Qualcomm, which holds a ton of ARM SoC patents, and put them to good use with its Snapdragon line of SoCs for smartphones, tablets, and convertible notebooks, is foraying into enterprise computing market. The company is ready with its first prototype of a 24-core high-performance CPU based on the 64-bit ARM machine architecture. ARM-based processors are picking up momentum in the server and micro-server markets owning to their low cost, low cooling requirements, and high energy-efficiency; and Qualcomm wants a slice of that pie. Most enterprise Linux and FreeBSD distributors have versions of their server operating systems for the 64-bit ARM architecture, as do most popular server software providers.

The prototype 24-core CPU is socketed, and ships in a large land-grid array (LGA) package, much like Intel's Xeon chips. The first production chips will have a lot more than 24 CPU cores, said Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekhar. As a proof of concept, Qualcomm assembled three server blades using these chips, which were running Linux with a KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC using a LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) built with OpenStack. Qualcomm's target consumers are big Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which purchase hundreds of thousands of CPUs each year to cope with growing user- and content-traffic.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (US-FTC) has found that Samsung Electronics did not infringe upon patents held by NVIDIA. In a ruling made by Judge Thomas Pender on Friday (09/10), it's held that Samsung did not infringe two out of three NVIDIA-claimed patents, it did infringe upon a third one, but that patent is invalid because it's not a new invention compared to previously known patents.

Samsung manufactures the Exynos brand ARM SoCs for its own smartphones, which embed a graphics core that NVIDIA claims is based on patent infringing technology. NVIDIA, which claims that it invented the first GPU and released it in 1999, accused Samsung and Qualcomm of using its patents on graphics chip technology without permission. The company claims that both Samsung Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon (which make up a majority of Android device chips), breach its IPR. Its claims don't seem to hold water with the US-FTC. "We remain confident in our case," commented NVIDIA spokesperson Robert Sherbin to Reuters. The ruling will be reviewed by the full bench of the commission in February 2016.

In a bid to regain market share lost to Intel and Killer (Qualcomm) in the DIY motherboard market, particularly with motherboards targeted at online gaming PC builds; Realtek unveiled a new onboard LAN solution called the Realtek Dragon. Intel and Killer have replaced Realtek as a preferred onboard Ethernet chip provider for DIY PC motherboards over the past two generations, as perception of their lower driver overhead, lower latencies, and other advantages spread. Sensing that merely improving drivers for its existing RTL8111 family of PCIe gigabit Ethernet PHY chips won't fix the situation, Realtek sought to give its latest generation an off-beat brand name that it hopes could appeal to the DIY crowd.

At the heart of the Realtek Dragon is the new RTL8118AS, a PCIe gigabit Ethernet PHY, much like the 8111 family. Realtek says it made refinements to the chip over previous generations, which will offer better performance (lower driver overhead) for traffic with small UDP packets, which is how most online multiplayer games work, and lower power consumption than competing solutions, such as the Killer E2200. Realtek even set a new branding for its chip, and will allow motherboard makers to print it on their PCBs, just as they print branding for Killer or Intel onboard LAN solutions. Realtek Dragon will make its debut with certain socket LGA1151 motherboards by ECS.

TP-LINK, a global provider of consumer and SMB networking products, today announced the Archer C2600 and Archer C3200 Wi-Fi routers utilizing advanced technologies to help meet the heavy networking demands of today's homes and small businesses. The Archer C2600 is ideal for supporting a large number of wireless devices simultaneously, while the Archer C3200 delivers the highest combined Wi-Fi speeds with two 5GHz bands for an optimized entertainment experience when gaming online or streaming 4K videos.

"There is a limit on what a simple increase in bandwidth can do to improve the performance of Wi-Fi routers in the home," said Lewis Wu, executive vice president of TP-LINK U.S. "To continue improving the speed, reliability, and overall quality of our routers we are utilizing advanced technologies that allow them to serve connected devices with far greater efficiency."

MSI updated its flagship Gaming series socket LGA2011V3 motherboard portfolio with an upgraded variant of the X99S Gaming 9 AC, the X99S Gaming 9 ACK. The "K" in the "ACK" stands for "Killer," denoting the board's Killer DoubleShot Pro feature, which lets you team up your wired gigabit Ethernet, with WLAN, to produce a staggering 1.866 Gbps of bandwidth, at low latency. In other words, the board features a Qualcomm Killer WLAN controller, instead of the Intel-made one on the standard X99S Gaming 9 AC. The wired gigabit Ethernet interface is care of a Killer E2205 controller, whereas the WLAN interface is handled by a Killer 1525 chip, which supports 802.11 ac, in addition to Bluetooth 4.0. The rest of this board's feature-set is identical to that of the X99S Gaming 9 AC. MSI will formally announce the board later this month.

NVIDIA today announced that it has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, alleging that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing.

The identified Samsung products include the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4 mobile phones; and the Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2 computer tablets. Most of these devices incorporate Qualcomm mobile processors -- including the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and 805. Others are powered by Samsung Exynos mobile chips, which incorporate ARM's Mali and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU cores.

TP-LINK today launched the 802.11a/n Wi-Fi compatible TP-LINK Pharos CPE510 outdoor wireless access point - a 5GHz 300Mbps 13dBi CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) - for point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and outdoor Wi-Fi coverage applications. Outdoor wireless access points can provide WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) coverage over great distances to homes or cottages without cable/DSL services; campus and multiple buildings; point-to-point links between office buildings; and at remote job sites in industries such as oil and gas, mining, and construction.

The CPE510 will greatly appeal to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) for point-to-multipoint link communications, when extending coverage across a wide geographic area to customers. The new outdoor wireless access point also offers remote surveillance capabilities via an available second Ethernet port with software enabled PoE (Power over Ethernet) output for seamless IP camera connectivity. The CPE510 can operate in multiple modes: Wireless Access Point (AP), AP Client Router, AP Repeater, AP Router, Multi-Bridge, and AP Client Router WISPs.

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that it has taken two major steps to enable the industry to deliver multi-gigabit wireless with 60 GHz technology for mobile, computing and networking devices. First, Qualcomm has completed its acquisition of Wilocity, a leader in development of 60 GHz wireless chipsets based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard, also known as WiGig technology. Second, the company is delivering a family of tri-band platforms that combine Qualcomm Atheros, Inc.'s Wi-Fi and WiGig solutions to significantly increase performance and enable cutting-edge wireless applications.

The initial tri-band platform is a reference design based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, which is the world's first mobile platform designed to support WiGig to enable applications such as 4k video streaming, peer-to-peer content sharing, networking, wireless docking, and backing up entire media libraries in seconds. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Rambus Inc. today announced that it has signed a comprehensive patent license agreement with Qualcomm Global Trading Pte. Ltd., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. The agreement provides Qualcomm Incorporated and its subsidiaries with access to innovative patented memory, interface, and security technologies from Rambus. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.

"This agreement highlights our ongoing commitment to providing access to valuable memory and security technologies to industry leaders," said Dr. Ron Black, president and chief executive officer at Rambus. "Engaging with Qualcomm with this agreement gives us an opportunity to collaborate with the broader industry to bring compelling solutions to the segment."

Microsoft will present its first paper on DirectX 12, its next-generation multimedia API, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), on the 20th of March, 2013. The event could include presentations by NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. It's not clear at this point if Microsoft will release developer tools and resources on that day, or simply outline the API to spur interest. If anything, it should gently nudge today's GPU manufacturers to make their future GPU designs ready for the API. There are currently no GPU families that we know of, which support DirectX 12. AMD's current Graphics CoreNext 2.0 GPUs, such as the Radeon R9 290X, support DirectX 11.2, while NVIDIA's "Maxwell" GPUs, such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, feature an identical API feature-level support to their "Kepler" predecessors.

Futuremark is proud to announce that Quanta Computer has joined its Benchmark Development Program. Quanta will work with Futuremark to create new benchmarks for PC and mobile platforms. Futuremark creates the world's most widely used benchmarks, software that helps people compare the performance of the devices they depend on every day. 3DMark and PCMark are used throughout industry, business and government, by more than a thousand specialist press publications, and millions of people worldwide.

Quanta Computer is the world's largest notebook computer ODM company. Quanta manufacturers one out of every three laptops sold globally and is an ODM partner for every one of the top ten PC companies. In recent years, Quanta has extended its businesses into enterprise network systems, home entertainment, mobile communication, automotive electronics and digital home markets.

Although NVIDIA's Tegra line of SoCs are among the best performing there are on the market; the high-end SoC market is dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung. These chips are built from scratch by the companies, but the underlying CPU and GPU architectures are licensed from ARM, and the likes of Imagination Technologies, respectively. Imagination's PowerVR graphics cores make up over 80 percent of the embedded GPU market-share. There's a big change of plans at NVIDIA. The company is beginning to think that its expertise in GPU is better proliferated in the mobile SoC space not by waiting for Tegra to gain a foothold, but by licencing its GPU IP (intellectual property) to whoever is willing pay up, much in the same way ARM and Imagination do.

NVIDIA spokesperson David Shannon, in a recent blog post, wrote: "our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market... We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers."

Today D-Link announced the pre-order availability of its most advanced Gaming Router to date, the D-Link Gaming Router with Qualcomm StreamBoost technology (DGL-5500). The D-Link Gaming Router offers AC1300 wireless speeds with unique traffic shaping and bandwidth management coupled with four gigabit Ethernet ports to deliver the ultimate in gaming performance, media streaming and network control. The Gaming Router is now available to customers in the U.S. for pre-order through newegg.com and will begin shipping Aug. 1.

"The Gaming Router represents the ultimate in high-performance connectivity to give power users the ability and control they need to do what they love online without the concern or interruption of buffering and lag," said Daniel Kelley, vice president of marketing, D-Link Systems, Inc. "Today's action role-playing games and MMOs are more competitive than ever and with limited bandwidth coming into the home, gamers need to ensure they're making the most of their connectivity to maintain an advantage. With Qualcomm StreamBoost technology, the new Gaming Router is designed to do just that - shape the network traffic to help gamers do more and lag less."

At a media event held in its Taipei headquarters, GIGABYTE demonstrated its AMP-UP integrated audio solution that will feature on some of its upcoming motherboards. On that pretense, it even got to show of two of its top socket LGA1150 motherboards, built for Core "Haswell" processors, the G1.Sniper 5, and the G1.Sniper M5. Positioned in gamer-overclocker targeted G1.Killer series, the two boards are based on Intel Z87 Express chipset. The G1.Sniper 5 is the larger standard ATX motherboard; while the M5 is a compact micro-ATX offering. The pictures also confirm that socket LGA1150 retention module and bolt-spacing is identical to sockets LGA1155 and LGA1156.

The G1.Sniper 5 appears to feature a 16-phase VRM, which uses ferrite-core chokes, and the same International Rectifier PowIRstage components as Ultra Durable 5 motherboards from the previous generation. This time around, the CPU plays a greater role in voltage regulation. The driver-MOSFETs on the board are cooled by an active fan-heatsink, which also has a liquid channel running through it, so you could make it part of your CPU loop. Thankfully GIGABYTE didn't let its imagination run away with designs of the other heatsinks on the board, one of which cools the Z87 Express chipset, and the other we imagine, a PLX PEX8747 48-lane PCI-Express 3.0 bridge chip. This chip gets you 4-way SLI/CrossFireX support.

AMD today announced that Raja Koduri, 44, has rejoined the company as corporate vice president, Visual Computing, reporting to Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer. In his new role, Koduri will have overall responsibility for driving AMD's innovation in visual and accelerated computing.

"Maintaining AMD's position as a leader in visual computing is the key to our long-term success. As one of the industry's foremost experts in developing leading-edge visual computing solutions, Raja brings exceptional vision and strength to AMD's world-class engineering leadership team," said Papermaster. "Given his past record of success, Raja will help AMD lead the way in visual and accelerated computing and ensure we continue developing the industry-leading graphics IP that forms the foundation for our future growth."

MSI, the world-leading manufacturer of graphics cards and motherboards, is happy to announce an extensive partnership with Qualcomm Atheros to implement Killer Networking technology in not only MSI's gaming notebooks, but also a new lineup of MSI gaming motherboards. With this implementation gamers and professionals alike can now utilize Killer technology to enhance their gaming and video streaming experience. By adding a healthy dose of intelligence to the networking part of MSI motherboards a lot of work is taken out of the hands of the users who can focus better at the task at hand, be it fragging competitors or professional network services.

AMD today announced that Charles Matar and Wayne Meretsky have joined the company to assume critical new engineering leadership roles driving hardware and software intellectual property (IP) development for AMD's system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. Matar will draw upon his expertise in SoC and processor design to lead AMD's SoC methodology and client SoC execution. Meretsky will lead the company's software development, ensuring tools will be in place that will enable developers to take advantage of the compute power in AMD's SoC designs.

"Charles and Wayne will serve as key members of our engineering brain trust, bringing with them years of expertise in SoC design and developing 64-bit software ecosystems, respectively," said Mark Papermaster, AMD Chief Technology Officer. "The fact that these computing experts have returned to the company underscores AMD's unique position and opportunity, based on differentiated IP, to take a leadership position in low-power clients and dense cloud servers."

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Atheros, Inc., introduced StreamBoost technology for Wi-Fi routers and gateways. By intelligently managing a home's broadband connection, Qualcomm StreamBoost gives each device and each application the bandwidth it needs to ensure the best possible experiences in the connected home.

In conjunction with this introduction, Alienware and D-Link Systems, Inc. will be demonstrating StreamBoost routers based on Qualcomm VIVE 802.11ac technology for Gigabit-class Wi-Fi at International CES. StreamBoost routers will be available to consumers this spring at e-commerce and retail outlets in North America, Europe and Asia.

Global Foundries could soon howdy-neighbor TSMC in upstate New York, with the Taiwanese semiconductor giant looking to set up a fab there. According to an X-bit Labs report, TSMC began groundwork on its US venture by consulting with Deloitte, to look for viable sites in Rensselaer, Saratoga and Oneida counties, that have abundant water, power, and gas to operate 3.2 million square feet buildings with 1,000 employees, 40 percent of which are college-graduated engineers.

Deloitte also took a look around Luther Forest Technology Campus, where Global Foundries' Fab 8 is located. A little earlier this week, Bill Owens, a Congressman from upstate New York flew to Taiwan, to meet with TSMC CFO Lora Ho to pitch upstate a little more. TSMC is a principal foundry partner of companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and AMD.

Heralding a new era in high-speed wireless connectivity, Wilocity, the leading developer of 60 GHz multi-gigabit wireless chipsets, today announced that it is jointly providing tri-band wireless chipsets with Qualcomm Atheros, Inc., for Dell's first WiGig enabled Ultrabook for business, the Latitude 6430u. Dell announced the Latitude 6430u last week and demonstrated its multi-gigabit wireless docking and networking capabilities at a Windows 8 launch attended by Dell and Microsoft executives in New York City.

Dell's new Latitude 6430u Ultrabook, integrating the Tri-band chipset from Wilocity and Qualcomm-Atheros, will be among the very first devices to reach the market featuring WiGig technology (IEEE 802.11ad). WiGig technology represents a new and major step forward in the wireless mobile experience by allowing data transfer rates that are over 10 times faster than current Wi-Fi technologies. Wilocity and Qualcomm Atheros' Tri-band system allows Ultrabook users to connect to peripherals such as docks, displays and storage at multi-gigabit speeds, while maintaining standard Wi-Fi coverage throughout the enterprise.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated mobile devices graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for first half of 2012.

We found that shipments of GPUs in mobile devices (tablets and smart phones) during the first half of 2012 had a growth year to year (1h'11 to 1h'12) of 69.4%. Samsung's sales surged in the first half giving them the highest CAGR for the year (179%), followed by Qualcomm (39%), which was already enjoying high shipment rates. MediaTek (included under "Others" for this report but we will break them out by name in our next report on mobile devices) had a phenomenal 966% growth year to year (starting from a very low base).

Qualcomm Atheros, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), today announced the availability of its Killer DoubleShot offering on high performance gaming laptops from MSI Computer. Killer DoubleShot encompasses a melding of Killer's Ethernet and wireless networking solutions that features a newly designed unified user interface for streamlined user control. Designed to provide the lowest-latency, highest-performance Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections for online games, video and voice, the MSI GT70 is the first product equipped with Killer Technology's award-winning Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware with unified Killer Network Manager software.

"The industry has come to know Killer technology as the choice solution to intelligently manage network traffic and optimize a user's online experience," said Michael Cubbage, director of business development for the networking business unit of Qualcomm Atheros. "With MSI's integration of our new Killer DoubleShot Wi-Fi and Ethernet solution, we are able to offer laptop gamers the chance to have the highest-performance connection to their online games, regardless of what type of Internet connection they use."

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated mobile devices graphics chip shipments for the first half of 2012. Mobile devices include smartphones, tablets, and game consoles.

The market for portable devices (mobile devices that we can carry) continues to soar in spite of economic difficulties and general uncertainty. Although portable devices are not necessarily replacing the PC, they are outselling the PC. All of these devices have a graphics processor (GPU) integrated in the device's system on a chip (SoC) application processor.

The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation today announced that Qualcomm Incorporated has joined as a Founder Member. Qualcomm's commitment reinforces HSA as the next technological underpinning in computing for a broad range of platforms and devices. Since its formation in June, the HSA Foundation has more than doubled its membership with new Founder, Supporter, Contributor and Associate members that have joined the consortium.

Qualcomm joins AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek Inc., Samsung Electronics Ltd. and Texas Instruments as founder members of the HSA Foundation. The companies are working together to drive a single architecture specification, which simplifies the programming model for software developers on modern platforms and devices. The HSA Foundation will unlock the performance and power efficiency of the parallel computing engines found in heterogeneous processors.

Futuremark is proud to announce that Acer Incorporated, Intel, Qualcomm Incorporated and SingTel-Optus have joined its Benchmark Development Program to create a new 3DMark gaming benchmark for Android-based tablets and smartphones. The Futuremark Benchmark Development Program gathers input and expertise from the world's best and most technologically advanced companies to create industry standard benchmarks for performance measurement. 3DMark for Android is expected to be released later this year.

Jukka Makinen, Futuremark CEO said, "For more than 10 years, we have worked with the world's leading PC hardware manufacturers to create 3DMark and PCMark. As a result, Futuremark benchmarks are the industry standard for PC performance measurement used by hundreds of press publications and millions of end-users. As we bring 3DMark to a new OS for the first time, we are excited to expand our cooperation to include Acer, Intel, Qualcomm and SingTel-Optus, technology leaders who will bring unparalleled insight, experience and vision to the development of 3DMark for Android."