Android accounts for one-quarter of mobile web traffic
Android is mopping up Apple and RIM's declining mobile mindshare in the US, you'll find nothing but corroboration from Quantcast. The analytics firm reckons a full one-quarter of mobile web traffic stateside comes from devices running Google's OS
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"Another thing that confuses me:
Rather than shrinking dies all the time, wouldn't it be better to have larger die with a lower transistor density? The thermal density would be lower and the larger surface area would improve heat transfer to the heatsink...both of which would reduce thermal fatigue. Of course, you'd have longer tracks in some places which would be harder to drive and would generate more heat, but still. Anyone know why this isn't done?
My guess is that manufacturers don't care about thermal fatigue, since power dissipation and clock speed are usually more important to customers (except maybe the military). Thoughts?"
They do care (a bit) about "thermal fatigue", which I think is your reference to what's known as electromigration. More importantly, the thermal density IS something GPU makers have to worry about, because if your heatsink can't transfer the heat from the tiny little chip into the big heatsink and fan that's attached, then the GPU will overheat and then melt. But those aren't too big concerns to GPU makers RELATIVE to the cost of the GPU. The main determining factor for the cost of making a GPU, once you've finished designing the chip, is the die size. The die size is the physical square area of the chip (usually measured in square millimetres, or mm^2). That's why going to a smaller manufacturing process such as 40nm (which more or less indicates how small they can make the transistors or switches which make up the GPU) saves you money - it lets you pack in the same number of transistors into a smaller area (or die size).
Here's the main point, though - WHY does a smaller die size mean a lower manufacturing cost? Because this is how CPU's or GPU's are made: they are produced on silicon wafers. Usually the silicon wafer is 300mm in diameter, and it's basically a thin disc of silicon. How you make the CPU's/GPU's is you "pattern" (through a process called photolithography) the tiny transistors which will make up the circuits of the CPU/GPU. It's a combination of an optical projector-like process and a chemical process, done over and over again.
So if your CPU/GPU design takes up lots of space on the wafer, then you will be able to fit much fewer chips onto your silicon wafer. The bulk of the cost is in processing each wafer and how many optical/chemical steps your chip requires to be made, NOT how many chips are actually being fit onto the wafer. So if your chip is half the size and let's say you can fit twice as many on the wafer as before, then all of a sudden your chip costs 50% less to make.