Samsung growing its own 4G chipsets
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Dec 30th 2008 12:43AM
posted Dec 30th 2008 12:43AM
You know those annoying little stickers you get on new handsets proudly boasting that they're packing 3G technology from Qualcomm? Yeah, well, those have already started to go away as manufacturers have turned to competing chipsets -- but Samsung buyers definitely won't need to peel those off anymore in a year or two when the Korean giant starts rolling out its WiMAX- and LTE-based phones. Its own homegrown WiMAX silicon is already available in sample quantities to both its own phone guys and other companies, and LTE versions are on the way (though it's not clear whether the LTE stuff will be ready in time for their very first phone models to use the technology). Ultimately, Samsung hopes to shave costs and avoid a few pesky royalty payments by doing things in-house, and seeing how every single phone in a few years is going to need one of these two technologies on board, we'd say this is a good place to start.[Via GigaOM]
oh yeah i remember those qualcomm stickers. they always came with my samsung a900 and upstage.
lol at qualcomm, good riddance stickers
And hopefully no more Qualcomm-crippled multimedia and drivers.
Quallcomm just makes the communications chips, unless you have a Sanyo phone - they make nothing else in the phone.
Only domestic company I know of that makes their own CDMA processors is Motorola, which they honestly do a good job at.
@ Ted Lup: you obviously never heard of any of the Qualcomm MSM line of SoC chips (6xxx, 72xx) for CDMA/UMTS, that's been at the core of many a cpu/gpu driver controversy.
Motorola buys their CPUs from Qualcomm, also.
@Teh Lup
Not true- qualcomm bundles a ton of it's communication chips in packages that also include processors (typically ARM based), video, audio, and I/O hardware. This leads to a lot of qualcomm radio based devices also just getting all of their hardware in an all-in-one package from qualcomm to save complexity and cost.
I would personally love to see Intel license a stripped down Atom core ala classic x86 days that sammy could then toss together with their own 4G networking chips.