Comments on: New processor could chip away at smartphone costs

Sandbridge Technologies develops a programmable chip for mobile phones that will allow manufacturers to pack in more functionality at a much lower price.

[3rdalbum]

It won't decrease the price of phones. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (which I imagine this is) are expensive compared to fixed hardware chips. Using FPGAs will make the development of hardware chips faster, but I bet all the phone manufacturers use them anyway for prototyping. FPGAs are too expensive for widespread distribution as part of a finished product.

[aravindh_k]

I think he's talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio

[NKND200]

The Sandblaster® DSP is a powerful and flexible technology alternative to traditional dedicated baseband hardware that is revolutionizing mobile handset design.

DSP is technology and not FPGA.

[Pishkado]

For a decade or so now, mobile phones have tracked personal computers fairly closely in most parameters of computing power, with a lag of 6-7 years. (My original insight into this was inspired by a talk by Norm Fjeldheim of Qualcomm, then its CTO if memory serves.) This simply says that the trend continues.

If you think about a PC (in the generic sense, not implying Windows) of 2001 or thereabouts, it was a pretty capable device. The main reasons we don't use mobile phones to do the same things today have to do with keyboard, display size, and mass storage to store large applications. All of those now have, or soon will have, work-arounds. Those are not yet well-integrated into the overall system, but they surely will be. When that happens, even a MacBook Air or a Netbook will seem oversized!