From mainframes to minicomputers and thereupon personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each day, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That is why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.

An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the potential of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will plus cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell

phone. Many expect the resulting effect to convert both devices and all the companies that compose them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Web devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing considering computing speed — at which Intel excels — is no longer the most vital factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses ability becomes more critical.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing capability consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for nearly 30 years.

Other chip makers have not ignored ability consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as distant…

Orginal post by Top Tech News