Why Computing Guys Don’t Get Mobile: Qualcomm’s Bill Davidson on Modems, Power Constraints, and Scarce Spectrum Resources

obviously very interested in wireless because of the growth prospects. And then you have us; we’re a traditional wireless company, it’s all we’ve ever been focused on, and we’re pretty unique in that respect, right? There aren’t many others who have only had that as their line of business. We think that gives us a bit of a better understanding of that market. What we understand is power constraints, mobility, scarce spectrum resources, and those sorts of things.

We really feel like we set the bar in the industry by being the first to a gigahertz processor. But what’s really important is the level of integration you do within the other parts, and that’s where we feel like the guys that are coming out of the computer space really don’t understand the market. It would be like in an era of $4 a gallon gasoline not caring if the car only gets 5 miles per gallon. So they really focus on the processing, which is how many gigahertz and how many cores. But you don’t hear them say in the same breath [that they’re] doing it really efficiently, recognizing that we’re in a mobile environment. So it’s why we’ve said our 800-megahertz processor actually outperforms the 1-gigahertz offerings that we’ve seen from competitors out there. It’s because of that level of integration that we do.

Xconomy: Is that on any network?

BD: It’s a lab simulation. But it’s what people are realizing out in the marketplace using one of our solutions. In our case, we have WiFi integrated, we have GPS integrated, the modem is integrated. In those non-integrated solutions, you’re powering all those individual parts, there’s communications that has to happen between them, it generates heat, and it leads to less battery life.

X: Are there trends that your initiatives are targeting?

BD: In the last two to three years, the [software] development environment has really shifted over to mobile for the gaming community because the volume is so much higher. But games require

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.