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Huawei joins the octa-core club with a high-spec mobile chip of its own
It's been a year since Huawei's Richard Yu's teased his company's octa-core HiSilicon system-on-chip, and according to the exec's recent Sina Weibo post (screenshot after the break), said product is finally ready. In fact, Yu revealed that his company's launched two new 28nm HPM chips. The octa-core model (likely the K3V3) features the usual quad Cortex-A15 plus quad Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE combo (as implemented by Samsung Exynos 5 Octa); and there's also a new quad-core Cortex-A9 model (likely the K3V2 Pro), which succeeds the 40nm K3V2 that features the same architecture. What's unclear is whether the octa-core chip will allow all eight cores to run simultaneously, but what we do know is that both chips come with a multi-mode LTE modem that will also handle both WCDMA and China Mobile's TD-SCDMA radios. Yu also made a separate post to say we're entering the era of 64-bit octa-core processor (Cortex-A53 plus Cortex-A57) this year, but the message was deleted soon afterwards. What a tease. Anyhow, we have a feeling that Huawei will be showing off its first device powered by its own octa-core chip at MWC next month. That's not to say Huawei's saying goodbye to Qualcomm and MediaTek, though -- Yu confirmed that he'll have more "high-end" devices that will feature chips supplied by these two companies.
TSMC to triple 28nm chip shipment this year, asserts confidence in 20nm demand
At yesterday's investor meeting in Taipei, TSMC's chairman and CEO Morris Chang shared the good news that his company's 28nm chip shipment this year will triple that of last year, which should boost its annual increase in revenue to above the industry's average rate of seven percent. China Times reports that orders for TSMC's 28nm silicon are lined up to as far out as late Q3, courtesy of demand for ARM processors, baseband chips, graphics processors and x86 processors. This is no surprise considering the likes of Qualcomm (Snapdragon 600 and 800), Huawei (HiSilicon K3V2 Pro and K3V3), NVIDIA (Tegra 4), AMD (Temash and Kabini) and possibly Apple will be ordering more 28nm-based chipsets from the foundry throughout the year. TSMC did struggle with its 28nm supply for Qualcomm early last year, but it eventually caught up later on, and Chang stated that TSMC now owns nearly 100 percent of the 28nm process market. Looking further ahead, Chang said his company's already seen enough clients and demand for the upcoming 20nm manufacturing process, which should have a more significant financial contribution in 2014. The exec also predicted that at TSMC, its 20nm production will see a bigger growth rate between 2014 and 2015 than its 28nm counterpart did between 2012 and 2013 -- the former should eventually nab close to 90 percent of the market, said Chang. [Image credit: TSMC]
