It’s no secret that Qualcomm have been having a good year, not only has the Snapdragon S4 blown all benchmarks away but it’s still keeping up with quad-core chips from Nvidia and Samsung. This is down to the fact that the S4 SoC from Qualcomm will do pretty much anything the market needs it to do. It has dual-core, LTE support and is readily available. Qualcomm are one of the biggest – if not the biggest – players in the SoC market because they’re so easy to deal with and they have the capability to deliver what manufacturers need to be successful.
Qualcomm came in first with 48% of all money spent on Chips from the first half of this year, according to research from Strategy Analytics. Trailing behind them were Samsung, MediaTek, Broadcom and Texas Instruments rounding out the top five. It’s interesting to see MediaTek as high up on the list as they are, being the company behind low-cost SoCs that go into phones destined for Russia, India and China. It’s difficult to find a phone in Europe or the States packing a MediaTek chip due to Intellectual Property issues so, to see them come third shows that the eastern market is getting bigger and bigger all the time. Samsung is a little funny here as I’m sure you’ve heard of their Exynos Chip that they create in-house – which is inside the global Galaxy S III – however, Samsung’s departments have to bid against others in the industry and if Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 delivers what AT&T or anyone else wants, then they get the deal over Samsung’s own department.
It’s encouraging to see Qualcomm have such a lion’s share of the market and I wonder where they’ll be this time next year, with the S4 Pro bringing quad-core Cortex-A15 performance to smartphones hitting towards the end of this year and the beginning of next.