APPLE'S A5 CHIP BEING MADE IN TEXAS BY SAMSUNG

Apple and other consumer electronics companies typically look to the Far East for components, but a new report suggests that the production of Apple’s current mobile processors has now moved to the United States. Reuters on Friday reported that the chip powering Apple’s current iPhone, iPad and iPod touch models is now manufactured in a new 1.6 million square foot Samsung factory located in Austin, Texas. The report cites unnamed people familiar with Samsung’s operations. Samsung’s new Austin facility — which is the size of nine football fields — reportedly reached full production earlier this month, and it was built to manufacture non-memory chips. The South Korea-based company confirmed that its Texas plant was recently expanded to manufacture logic chips, though it would not comment specifically on Apple or its A5 processor. Reuters reported earlier this year that Samsung lost the contract to build Apple’s next-generation A6 processor, which will instead be manufactured by Taiwan-based chip maker TSMC.

INTEL POWERED SMARTPHONES COMING NEXT YEAR

According to Reuters, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini confirmed that smartphones powered by Intel’s Medfield mobile processor would land next year. Otellini also denied earlier rumors that Intel might include ARM technology in future chips. “There’s no advantage going in there, we’d be beholden to someone else, beholden to ARM. We’d pay royalties to them so it would lower the overall profits,” Otellini explained during Intel’s annual investor meeting in California.

Intel’s Atom processors have been used in tablets and netbooks, but the firm has been noticeably absent in the smartphone market, which has been dominated by ARM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, and Samsung. “With Medfield we’re in the power envelope for phones … We’re working with several customers and we start to expect to see the revenue ramp toward the end of this year,” Intel’s CFO Stacy Smith said

SAMSUNG RENAMES MOBILE PROCESSORS EXYNOS

Via a press release, electronics manufacturer Samsung announced that it would be giving its application processors — the ones designed to work in smartphones and tablets — a new name: Exynos.

“Application processors for the mobile market are one of the flagship products in our semiconductor business,” said the company’s vice president of marketing, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to introduce the brand name of Exynos for Samsung’s application processor family. As consumers demand more from their mobile products, Samsung’s Exynos chips will be the power inside enabling the coolest HD multi-media features with even longer battery life.”

It looks like Sammy is trying to capitalize on some of the name-brand mindshare that has cropped up in the smartphone and tablet processor-markets (Hummingbird, A4, Snapdragon, Tegra 2, etc.). The new name will first be used on a dual-core processor with the codename Orion; henceforth to be known as the Exynos 4210. The 4210 is set to enter production next month.

VERIZON iPHONE COSTS MORE OFF CONTRACT THAN AT&T

Verizon's iPhone is expected to sell over nine million units in 2011, most of which will be at the promotional price of $199 for the 16GB and $299 for the 32GB with a two year contract. These are the same prices as AT&T.

However, some of those nine million will be at full retail without any promotional pricing. Those people can expect to pay an additional $50 for the Verizon version, over the the AT&T version. Verizon's full retail price for the 16GB is $649 versus AT&T's $599 and the 32GB will set them back $749 versus $699 at AT&T.

While the CDMA chipset, used in the Verizon iPhone, costs about $30 more, this does not justify the increase in price considering the markup for the iPhone is around 400 percent.

ARM CHIPS CUT XO LAPTOP POWER NEEDS TO 2 WATTS

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) has been making XO Laptops since 2006. The original goal was to create a laptop for kids in developing countries that only cost $100 to manufacture. Although the laptop was made, it ended up costing $199.

While the focus now may be on OLPC’s forthcoming XO-3 Tablet, the XO Laptop continues to be updated. The original device was v1.0, but the current model shipping has had a number of updates and now carries the version number 1.5. At CES last week v1.75 was shown off, and it brings with it some significant improvements thanks mainly to ARM.

One of the major problems of using any electronics hardware in a developing country is gaining access to a reliable power source. The OLPC solved this for the XO Laptop by offering a manual crank charger. The only problem being it took a couple of hours to fully charge the battery.

While the availability of power in certain regions of the world cannot be solved by the OLPC, it can improve upon the power use of the XO Laptop. And with v1.75 they have managed to half that power use. The reason this has been made possible is the move to use an ARM rather than an x86 processor. So now rather than drawing 4 watts of power, the XO-1.75 draws 2 watts. The new chip being used is a 1GHz Armada 610 from Marvell. [Geek]