

Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says - drone
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57532251-94/amazon-looks-to-acquire-ti-mobile-chip-business-report-says/

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benologist
Rewording of Engadget's rewording of The Next Web's translation of

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calcalist.co.il%2Finternet%2Farticles%2F0%2C7340%2CL-3584838%2C00.html)

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aristidb
We need more efficient ways to get tech news than via chains of rewordings,
indeed.

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chrismorgan
This post's title is inaccurate and needs fixing. The article's title is:
"Amazon looks to acquire TI mobile chip business, report says".

It's an external report which is claiming that the two companies are in talks.
It's not a press release from Amazon or TI saying they're doing it.

[BTW: what is flagging meant to be used for? Why is there no documentation on
these features?]

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freehunter
Flagging is the extreme version of a downvote. Rather than expressing the
uselessness of a post, it expresses the need for the post to be reviewed by a
moderator (removed from the site altogether, reworded headline, merged with
another article). Generally it's used on articles that are obvious troll
articles, completely illegitimate articles, or highly inaccurate headlines.

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numeral_two
Wonder if this means no more Beagleboards/pandaboards, etc...

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drone
I would think it's in Amazon's overall interest, not necessarily in
Amazon.com's interest, to further ingratiate themselves in the developers
community.

That being said, much of the TI development kits are sold at-cost, or even
nearly below (see the launchpad series, $5 development boards), so it may not
be as economically feasible for Amazon to match that pricing, giving that
selling bulk chips aren't their business.

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zokier
Launchpads would not be affected by this deal which only is about the OMAP
series.

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drone
I know, I was implying that beagleboard/pandabaord may be being sold at a
limited profit much like the launchpad boards, to attract interest to the
platform.

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st3fan
This is awesome. I'll have a cheaper ARM-based EC2 host please.

Has anyone considered that this could also be for ARM-based servers instead of
just Kindles? :-)

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eli
I could be wrong, but I think this is only talking about TI's mobile baseband
chips, not ARM processors.

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mtdev
If they are referring to TI's OMAP processors, then they typically feature
multiple ARM cores with various media accelerators
(<http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/swpt034b/swpt034b.pdf>). These are like all-in-one
chips designed for mobile platforms that are optimized for displaying media on
a LCD-ish display at minimum power. The OMAP offerings are pretty similar to
chips from Broadcom or Samsung, however, it makes sense for them to get
integrated with their biggest customer. They already have NDAs in place and TI
probably has field engineers that essentially work for Amazon, they would just
be transferring financial stake different production processes.

Having said that, the reason that you probably don't want to run a EC2
instance on an OMAP, or any ARM for that matter, is because they are not 64bit
compatible, they do not have good virtualization support, and you would not be
taking advantage of various media/display capability.

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eli
Well, it's a very poorly sourced article, but TI has been trying to unload its
old baseband mobile chip division so it could _focus_ on OMAP 4.

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blinkingled
Considering how many Kindles Amazon sells at break even or at cost to them,
this would indeed be a good business for them even if they kept all of TI's
output to themselves. SoC has got to be an insignificant part of the cost with
margins etc.

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steevdave
Actually the processor itself is normally fairly cheap, the LCD is normally
the largest price (or storage, depending on what type and how much space is
provided.)

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lmm
There are enough companies making ARM processors that I'm not worried about
the loss of competition; Barnes & Noble could easily switch to NVidia or
Qualcomm or Samsung or...

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programminggeek
This would be a good move for Amazon. Look at the biggest phone/tablet sellers
right now - both Samsung and Apple design their own chips and exercise a great
deal of control on the manufacturing as well. At a certain scale, there is a
big benefit to making your own hardware. If nothing else, it lets you optimize
for your own requirements instead of for the requirements of other customers.

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Someone
I think it _could_ be a good move. Execution will be everything here, and it
is a fairly new market for them (anybody know who designed the Kindles?)

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cbaleanu
Busines is mispelled in the title.

