DailyTech - Report: Amazon in Negotiations to Purchase Texas Instrument Mobile Chip Division

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Hardware Report: Amazon in Negotiations to Purchase Texas Instrument Mobile Chip Division
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - October 15, 2012 9:13 AM

14 comment(s) - last by inperfectdarkn.. on Oct 16 at 5:17 AM

Amazon could be looking to directly challenge Apple and Samsung

Amazon has become one of the biggest companies in the tablet market with its Kindle Fire and the new Kindle Fire HD tablets. With Amazon wanting to put pressure on Apple in the tablet market, it would make sense for the company to work on securing processors for its future assault.

Reuters reports that Amazon is in talks with Texas Instruments to purchase its mobile processor line. If the negotiations are successful and Amazon acquires the mobile processor line, it would make the online retail giant a direct rival to Apple and Samsung Electronics. Apple and Samsung Electronics are two giants in the smartphone and tablet market that also design their own chips.

By securing its own source of processors for tablets and smartphones, Amazon would have more control over the design of the parts and the performance of its products. Amazon currently uses Texas Instruments chips in its Kindle Fire tablets.

^{Kindle Fire HD}

Texas Instruments has already admitted to wanting to shift its wireless investment focus from smartphones to a broader market aiming for clients in the automotive sector and others where it hopes to be more profitable and stable.

Neither Amazon nor Texas Instruments have offered an official statement at this time.

Sources: The Next Web, Reuters

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RE: This does not make any sense to me.

By tayb on 10/15/2012 3:10:23 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Processors now are good enough for smooth operation and most of mobile software developers just are not agile enough to follow the CPU power increase curve and using it to the full extent.

Known anti-pattern! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat

I hope Amazon isn't blaming the sluggish Kindle Fire performance on the chipset. Sure, increasing chip performance will likely alleviate the performance problems but you're attacking the effect and not the cause. Older versions of Android aren't as fast as 4.0+ but they aren't THAT slow. Their development team needs to spend more time on optimization. Throwing them a faster CPU just continues the cycle... hence the anti-pattern.

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