Microsoft Reasserts That Qualcomm Is The Sole Chip Maker For WP7 Today and Tomorrow
I get that working with a closed set of chips means that you can optimize the heck out of them. Agreed. But Qualcomm isn’t the only chip maker in town. Well Microsoft is still using only Qualcomm chips and that appears to be staying that way. Andy Lees, head of the Windows Phone division, had an interview with Bloomberg and they reported it as follows:
Microsoft works exclusively with Qualcomm to develop chips that power handsets using its system, allowing it to specify technical details to ensure devices run more smoothly, the executive said.
There is currently no plan to work with other semiconductor makers for Windows Phone 7 devices, he said.
Frustrating. I mean, the goals are worthy but the method is pure fail. And I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Qualcomm and the Windows Mobile days…
I guess our only hope is Windows Phone 8.
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Don’t understand why it’s frustrating. Had Microsoft decided to partner up with say Texas Instruments or Tegra, the outcome would still have been the same as the platform still does not support dual core chips. This means that you would see a wide range of Windows Phones running on several different chip manufacturers but still only running on 1GHz speeds.
I personally prefer the way if is now. It is going at a slow, but steady, pace. It is not all over the place like Android, and is highly optomised to run WP7, even though the chip is almost 3 years old.
I’m definitely for optimisation over power. Although sometimes it is cool to show off all that power under the hood even though the extra power won’t actually do you any good
@Stefano: I love the fact that WP7 runs on a 1ghz chip without a hiccup. But there are plenty of other chip manafacturers that are bringing great things. It’s not just speed and cores. It’s also things like bluetooth support, video recording, etc. I’m not saying to open the floodgates but I’d like to see at least one oter manfuacturer in the mix to start to push the envelope a drop for MS. The restrictions help for consistentcy but Microsoft is always slow and steady…that’s their gift and curse. A little urgency every now and then won’t kill them;)
I think we saw what “urgency” on MS’s part produced….An OS that felt rushed to market(at least to me it did.
I think MS learned the mistakes it made with WM and don’t want to repeat history….the “smartphone fanboys” will always think something needs to be urgent to keep up with their wants and needs but time is on MS side….let them be..
Besides…If MS were to use different chip manufactuers it would run into the some of the same issues currently plaguing the Android platform. Incompatible this and that=delayed updates, frustrated users, fragmentation, etc.
What in the hell would be the techinical benefits of allowing other chipset makers? Regardless of the brand of chip, the optimization still stands as a testament to what can be done when you focus on making software not suck so much. My phone runs faster than most dual core phones I’ve run across. I have never once been disappointed by my phones speed. If anything I was really surprised when it got a lot faster from just updating from vanilla 7.0 to nodo and then again with mango. No clock speed bumps, just pure good old software scrubbing. One of the main reasons they chose c# for their programming. Its efficient and simple to run clean and fast. It doesn’t have a million different operators to do one thing like java. So no. I don’t care what experience you had on windows mobile. How does that have anything to do with this? That’s like saying you’re not going to pick michael jordan for your basketball team because he sucks at baseball. That would make you an idiot.
Oh nice, thanks for share!