Mobile World Congress: The new front in the processor battle

By John Morris

Mobile World Congress, the mega-conference taking place in Barcelona this week, is all about mobile phones. But the chips that power mobile devices suddenly seem to be getting as much attention as the gadgets themselves.

Over the past week a who’s who of chipmakers including Broadcom, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have announced new application processors. The pace of development has picked up as chipmakers start to focus on tablets, which operate on a faster PC cycle, as well as smartphones which have traditionally had long design cycles. Suddenly these new chips–all of which are based on ARM designs–are starting to look a lot more like PC processors in terms of performance and capabilities.

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