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

a lot of processing power. The [touch-screen] user interfaces that have been created for devices…you want them to be integrated in a very fluid way. Just the user interfaces that are being created now require a tremendous amount of processing power.

One of the other areas is augmented reality. We always say probably people’s first experience with augmented reality is the yellow first down line in football and John Madden’s scratching all over the screen like he used to love to do. There will be gaming applications. We showed the “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” game through augmented reality. But we actually think there will be useful things that come of it. I don’t speak Catalon, so when I go to Barcelona, I can hold my phone up to signs and read the English translation, sort of bobbing there.

But productivity and entertainment requires a tremendous amount of processing power because the camera in that scenario is basically looking at 30 frames per second to process the information that’s coming through.

The other thing the computer guys miss, we really love it when we see quotes from them that say [something] like the modem is a peripheral. Maybe that’s still true in the computer, but they’re still thinking it’s a Hayes 212A modem. In wireless it is not a peripheral…It’s an area where we’ve really been able to differentiate on performance.

Back in 2004, we were dealing with a lot of skepticism around our integration strategy. The players change over the years, but back then it was TI [Texas Instruments], and they were saying Qualcomm gets an “A” in modem and an “F” in apps processor… You’ve got to recognize the environment we’re in. We’re striving for lower power, we’re striving for better form factors, and that’s what this technology will do.

As a matter of fact, the need for this kind of integration is only higher because of the incredible form factors that people want to achieve. Since then, we’ve had LCD [liquid crystal display] and OLED [organic light-emitting diode] screens come into the devices. The display is the number one power draw on your phone. So we’re working on

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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.