Video game makers haven’t always been thrilled about making mobile games. But Qualcomm hopes to change that. Raj Talluri — the senior vice president of product development at the San Diego, Calif.-based mobile chip maker — addressed the DICE Summit, an elite game industry event in Las Vegas, to wake them all up. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors have been used in more than 500 million Android devices. And smartphones are selling at a rate of more than 500 million a year. That’s a pretty large market to target.

Soon enough, it won’t just be numbers that are attractive. Mobile chips are coming soon with as many as eight cores. That means that these low-power chips will be able to come close to the processing power of current-generation consoles on smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. And mobile networks will be carrying data at 150 megabits a second. That will make your cable modem look slow.

We interviewed Talluri at the DICE Summit. Here’s an edited transcript.

VentureBeat: So your talk was telling everybody about the size of the opportunity out here.

Raj Talluri: Yeah, and the technology that we do.

VB: Do you get any debate about that right now? In years past, these guys would have looked at the smartphone as a platform that couldn’t do what you wanted it to do. They would have ignored it. There are people who experimented with smartphones, and they did very well, but for the most part, the more hardcore teams were still working on consoles. What’s interesting about the timing right now, and how this is changing? Are you seeing some of the game developers change their minds?

Talluri: It’s a couple of things. One is performance, what processors have done in the last few years. They were like little toys before. You couldn’t do anything compared to what you can do now. That’s one thing. The other aspect of it is that the market opportunity is much bigger now. Selling 500 million smartphones. Another thing we’re finding is that some of the traditionals may not be doing it, but almost every one of them at least has a division that does mobile. They’re getting into it. And there are newcomers that have made a killing.

Obviously, there’s money to be made. The numbers are real. For a long time, it was only on iOS, but I think the Android Marketplace is working out. I talk to people now, and they’re able to make money on Android. Discovery is working. Operator billing is working. Free-to-play is working. Lots of things are changing now. But we’re still at the beginning. There’s a lot more to come.

VB: Does the ecosystem seem fairly complete to you?

Talluri: No. The ecosystems can always be better. I think it’s still in the beginning stages. Honestly, to me, this concept that you have to buy a game or get a game, and it comes on one platform one day, and then you have to buy it on another platform — in time, it’ll go away. I mean, how many times have I bought a game on Xbox or whatever, and then I have Windows Live on my phone, and it doesn’t work together? What happened? Why don’t I get the mobile version when I get the other version? Those kinds of things should go away. There shouldn’t be any real reason for it. I think all these things will happen with time.

VB: I find I’m looking forward to 150 megabits a second than anything else. [Laughs]

Talluri: It’s on the way. We showed it in the booth. We had it running.

VB: What is that going to do for gaming on mobile devices?

Talluri: Clearly, latency, when you play — it’s not just connected to bandwidth. It’s also about how the network is structured and how much data you can transfer. Those are the two big things. I think that this whole client-powered thing will become bigger, too. We’ll perform a lot of the work on the phone. We’ll do some more of it in the cloud and then ship it back and forth. It’s no longer about having all the processing in one place. That’s a paradigm shift that will happen.

VB: Something like OnLive, where you can do more cloud gaming?

Talluri: Yeah, but not just cloud gaming. Some of those things are not very scalable. You put so much computing in one place, but you can’t scale it. You undertake it when you have a powerful computer on both sides, and high bandwidth in between. It’s distributed gaming, more than cloud gaming. That’s how I think about it. You have a pretty powerful processor on this side, too.

VB: Predicting when we’ll get 150 megabits per second of bandwidth is a hard thing, though, right? You build the capability into the chipsets, but what’s AT&T’s schedule like, or Verizon’s schedule? Once they build it, will the capacity be upheld? The capacity of 3G and 4G seemed great until people started using it and sending YouTube videos all over the place, and then it crashed the whole system.

Talluri: Well, I don’t know if it crashed the whole system. My 4G still runs pretty well. [Laughs]

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If Steve Ballmer’s cameo during Qualcomm’s CES keynote didn’t make it clear enough, the chip company has an intimate relationship with Microsoft.

Today during a small Q&A session with press at CES, Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs elaborated on his thoughts on Windows Phone. Qualcomm’s chips power Windows Phone devices, and it’s also making inroads into Windows RT with Samsung’s ATIV tablet.

When asked how he thinks Microsoft’s mobile platform will be able to compete against the iPhone and Android, Jacobs said:

It’s too early to call the game one way or another. I never count out Microsoft out because they’re willing to put a lot of effort into things, they play the long game, they’ve got a lot of resources, they have a lot of benefits in the sense of tie-ins to enterprise software and Xbox … I think there’s definitely a great opportunity there [in Windows Phone]. We’re investing heavily in that technology.

While his comments were certainly self-serving, Jacobs’ faith in Windows Phone seemed genuine. Qualcomm is already the leading Android smartphone CPU provider, so it’s not like the company is hurting for business. Qualcomm has the luxury of being able to sit and wait until Windows Phone actually takes off — and it seems like it isn’t letting the platform’s slow initial sales scare it off.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anand Chandrasekher (pictured right) was once the technical assistant to Craig Barrett, the former chief executive of Intel. He made sure Barrett’s slide shows worked right. And then he went on to become a senior executive running Intel’s PC chips business.

Now, after a hiatus, he has jumped ship to mobile in a big way. After joining a startup, Chandrasekher has now joined mobile chip giant Qualcomm as its chief marketing officer and made his first public appearance today with John Jackson (pictured right), the vice president of research at IDC, at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. He noted that he won’t just copy Intel’s marketing game plan in his new job.

“You’re not going to see Qualcomm Inside,” he joked.

Qualcomm’s market capitalization is $103 billion. But now Chandrasekher says it will start spending money in a “concerted and focused manner” on making the brand better known.

“For that size of company, we are relatively unknown,” he said. His job will be to grow the company’s image and promote its sub-brands (such as its Snapdragon processor) as well, but without subverting the brands of its customers. (Intel has frequently been accused of doing so).

“We will always be partnership driven,” he said, noting that customers can always opt out of Qualcomm’s own ingredient marketing if that’s what they want.

You could see a certain irony in a man who was once the biggest advocates of the PC now promoting the smartphone and tablet revolution. But things change. Chandrasekher said that the landscape in mobile continues to change fast.

“In 2006, Nokia seemed unassailable,” he said. “Android and the Apple iPhone didn’t exist. This is not an industry where you can rest on your laurels.”

Chandrasekher said part of his job is to make sure that developers take advantage of the silicon chips that Qualcomm makes.

“If you don’t, our hardware is a nice toaster,” he said.

He said Qualcomm is focused on emerging markets like China and Latin America in addition to the U.S. The company wants to get its chips into smartphones and tablets being sold in all of those markets.

“You’ll see us invest in those markets,” he said. And over time, consumers will come to know Qualcomm, if Chandrasekher does his job right.

The app is an organizer for Android games on tablets and smartphones, and its purpose is to highlight the titles that run best on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor in a mobile device. In that respect, it’s a counter to Nvidia’s Tegra Zone app launched last year to highlight games that run on Nvidia chips.

The app shows that chip makers have to fuel an ecosystem not only around their chips but around the devices that use the chips. That theoretically creates market demand for more Snapdragon chips, which serve as the brains of a mobile device.

The Snapdragon GameCommand gives mobile users a way to quickly discover, organize and access the latest mobile games. And it gives developers a chance to have their games featured in the spotlight.

The phones include more gaming news and easy access to more than 100 Snapdragon GamePack featured games. The pack includes several titles running for a short time on an exclusive basis, including Fight Game Heroes from Khaeon Gamestudio; Bunny Maze 3D from Eyelead Software and Desert Winds from Southend Interactive. Qualcomm worked with those companies to make sure their games take advantage of the graphics capabilities of the Snapdragon chips.

The app allows users to access their favorite games in one spot with one group icon, accessible via a finger swipe on a smartphone or tablet. Snapdragon GameCommand also provides gamers with a source for the latest game news.

More than 60 percent of smartphone users regularly play games on their mobile devices.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Qualcomm unveiled a new class of its Snapdragon mobile processors today in an effort to maintain leadership in chips for smartphones and tablets.

The company announced its Snapdragon S4 class of mobile processors and enhanced its Snapdragon S1 chips for entry-level platforms. The S4 processors are aimed at lowering design, engineering and inventory costs while bringing the latest performance in 3G and 4G connection speeds to mobile data users. The company made the announcement at its analyst meeting in New York.

San Diego-based Qualcomm is trying to address the whole mobile market, from basic smartphones to high-end smartphones and tablets. The S4 chips are optimized for software that includes multimedia, connectivity, camera, display, security, power management, browsing, and natural user interface features. The S4 is a quad-core (four computing brains on one chip) chip built with a 28 nanometer manufacturing process.

Snapdragon chips are already in 300 smartphones and are in about 350 more that are under development. The heart of the new chips is the Krait central processing unit (CPU), which is built from the ground up for mobile performance and power management.

The new S4 chips include the MSM8660A, MSM8260A, MSM8630, MSM8230, MSM8627, MSM8227, APQ8060A and APQ8030. Devices based on the S4 processors will appear in early 2012. The new models of the low-end S1 chip are the MSM7225A, MSM7625A, MSM7227A and MSM7627A. Those chips are aimed at 2G and 3G phones. Rivals include Texas Instruments, Marvell, Broadcom and Nvidia.

Snapdragon has more than 225 design wins with 30 different Android smartphone manufacturers.

Smartphones are expected to sell 4 billion units between 2011 and 2015, according to estimates from Gartner, Strategy Analytics and IDC. Emerging regions are expected to be 50 percent of sales by 2015.

Qualcomm shipped more than 483 million MSMs, or modem chips, during its fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

Qualcomm is also expanding the number of games in its Snapdragon GamePack, which highlights games that run on its processors. The GameCommand app is aimed at bringing console-like games as well as casual titles to the Qualcomm platform. While the company’s main business is selling mobile chips, it sees the GamePack and GameCommand products as a way to make those chips more useful. It’s similar to how Intel invests in apps in order to make its chips more useful. It’s also similar to Nvidia’s Tegra Zone for showing off flash Nvidia-based Android games.

The company made the announcement at its analyst meeting in New York. The new games in the extended Snapdragon GamePack and the new GameCommand app are expected to hit the Android Market in early 2012. The GamePack has exclusive titles including The Ball (pictured at top) from Tripwire Interactive; Fight Game Heroes from Khaeon Gamestudio; and Galaga Special Edition from Namco Bandai Games.

The new GameCommand app provides mobile users with a way to quickly find and learn about the latest featured Snapdragon games. The app allows users to access their favorite games in one spot with one group icon, accessible via a finger swipe on a smartphone or tablet. Snapdragon GameCommand also provides gamers with a source for the latest game news.

“Qualcomm has received great user feedback since launching the Snapdragon GamePack, so we are expanding the quantity and quality of games while making them easier to locate through the launch of the Snapdragon GameCommand app,” says Raj Talluri, vice president of product management at Qualcomm.

More than 60 percent of smartphone users regularly play games on their mobile devices.

The GamePack, first included in June, includes games from Advanced Mobile Applications, Babaroga, Booyah Inc., Com2us USA, Digital Chocolate, Electronic Art, Eyelead Software, FISHLABS Entertainment, Glu Mobile, Guild Software, Gameloft, Khaeon Games, Namco Bandia Games America, NaturalMotion Games, Polarbit, PopCap Games, HandyGames, Southend Interactive, and Tripwire Interactive. Qualcomm worked with those companies to make sure their games took advantage of Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics components within the Snapdragon processors.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This interview is sponsored by Qualcomm.

As an enterprise-facing company, what do Qualcomm’s products mean for consumers?

We make the guts of the phone. We work very closely with our partners, like to Sony Ericsson, to deliver experiences for the end consumer. Consumers realize that you can buy a camera, you can buy an MP3 player, you can buy a navigator system, but you can just buy a phone and get all of those experiences. We work on developing those standalone device experiences such as audio, photo taking, graphics and battery conservation to create one device that is thin, light and lasts all day.

What is the biggest challenge for Qualcomm in engaging the consumer?

For Qualcomm, to launch a product that the end consumer can enjoy, we must work with a laundry list of people. Using mobile payments as an example, we spend our time interacting with partners like Google that create secure operating systems. Next we work with the operator to launch the system. We engage service providers like Paypal or Citybank to enable financial transactions. And we collaborate with phone makers like HTC to launch the app on their phone. There is a lot of plumbing that we take care of before it can reach the consumer. We create the machine.

Today, 3G is pretty widespread, but what are you doing to move the needle toward 4G?

We launched the first 4G phone, the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon, so we have the best 4G solution out there today. We focus on how to integrate, how to pull all these aspects together onto one chip. Put it together and you get lower costs, better power. We announced our integrated 4G plus apps processor called 8960, which will support Windows 8. The next generation of 4G phones that will come out in the first half of next year will all be using integrated 4G plus apps processor.

A theme of this year’s MobileBeat is mobile payments. How is Qualcomm working within this new sub-industry?

The issue with financial transactions on mobile is the limit on how much money you can move, given security parameters. We are spending time at Qualcomm to build an infrastructure that secures financial payments and lifts the limit. The infrastructure includes hardware inside the processor and software that allows applications to run inside a secure environment, which is authenticated with by a key mechanism. You’ll see products late this year or early next.

Are you partnering with anyone exciting for the consumer?

Scalado, a European company, came up with a really exciting technology that processes images in the JPEG domain very fast. We built the hardware inside our developer platform, Snapdragon, to take pictures at high speeds and compress them into the perfect shot. Scalado then built their application to complements our hardware. The app allows the user to choose a face from those high speed-taken photos and layers it smoothly on your end picture. It’s a total solution for mobile picture taking.

Tell me about Snapdragon, your platform of app developers.

Snapdragon has processors, modems, connectivity, everything needed for creating a smartphone app. When app developers create on Snapdragon, they have access to create for any device. It is the most widely used smartphone developer platform, used by 60 percent of Android developers and has 40 percent of market share. We have single core, dual-core, and quad-core development options in Snapdragon. The quad-core will come out next year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile web browsing can be slow and frustrating to users. It seems like there’s nothing that can be done about it, given the overburdened mobile networks of carriers that are facing increasing data usage.

But Sayeed Choudhury, director of product management and web technologies at Qualcomm, says it’s possible to optimize web browsers to take advantage of hardware such as Qualcomm’s mobile Snapdragon processors to deliver a better web experience. We spoke with him at VentureBeat’s recent Mobile Summit event in Sausalito, where he was a speaker.

By optimizing the software and hardware together, Choudhury says that it’s possible to make a page load faster and make it more navigable once it has loaded. Getting mobile video to play right is also important, while not consuming all of a smartphone’s battery power. That means Qualcomm works on making everything more efficient, from Javascript to rendering. This work has been happening for a couple of years, and now Javascript can run five times faster than it once did on Google’s platforms such as the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome web browser. The result is “snappier and glassy smooth” web browsing.

Check out Choudhury’s perspective on what can be done to speed up the mobile internet in the video below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Qualcomm just announced it has launched a new version of its Snapdragon mobile processor that can process data at a speed of 2.5 gigahertz. That’s as powerful as many laptop and desktop computer processors, but Qualcomm’s chip with as many as four cores, or brains, is aimed at smartphones and tablets.

That means mobile devices sold this year and early next year are likely to have just as much, if not more, computing performance as a lot of computers out there. So the new Snapdragon processors will enable a whole new generation of smartphones and tablets that can do everything from cool 3D games to displaying video from a phone on a big screen in full high-definition resolution.

Code-named Krait, the next-generation Snapdragon promises to deliver speeds of 2.5 gigahertz per core, with options for one, two or four cores. The Snapdragon family will also include four wireless capabilities — WiFi, global positioning system (GPS), Bluetooth and FM radio — in one device. It will also support near-field communications, a hot new technology that lets you wave a phone over a reader to make a purchase. And it will support stereoscopic 3D video, photo capture and playback.

Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon has 150 percent higher overall performance and 65 percent lower power consumption than currently available ARM-based CPU (central processing unit) cores. Qualcomm is able to make the big leap to this new generation because it has made a big manufacturing leap to 28 nanometer technology. Qualcomm released its 1-gigahertz Snapdragon chip with a single core in the fourth quarter of 2008 using a 65-nm technology.

The 28 nanometer technology is like a finer pencil, which can be used to etch smaller circuits on a chip. By cramming more circuits on a chip, Qualcomm is executing on the phenomenon known as Moore’s Law, named after former Intel chairman Gordon Moore, who predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every couple of years.

Qualcomm also announced its new Adreno family of graphics processing units (GPUs). The new quad-core Adreno 320 can deliver 15 times the performance of the original Adreno chip it replaces. Qualcomm says the Adreno 320 performance is similar to the quality of graphics on today’s game consoles, but at a much lower power consumption level.

The single-core Snapdragon MSM8930 chip has built-in LTE modem technology, which means it can deliver data networking speeds for mainstream smartphones at relatively low costs. The LTE technology (short for Long-Term Evolution) enables data speeds of 24 megabits a second or more in mobile phones. That’s as fast as the speed of cable modems in many homes.

The MSM8960 dual-core chip will be available in the second quarter, while the MSM8930 single-core chip and the quad-core APQ8064 chip will be available in early 2012. The APQ8064 chip in particular is aimed at tablet computers. Qualcomm made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress 2010 event in Barcelona today. We’ll have to see how rivals such as Marvell, Broadcom, Intel and Nvidia come in with their own new products this year to see who the winner will be.

[image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

If these ARM-based rivals can succeed in the market with their chips, they could break Intel’s near-monopoly on Windows PCs. And if Microsoft can do it, Apple probably can too.

You can see the demo for yourself in the video. Each different chip has its advantages. The Nvidia chip, for instance, can display software with lots of rich graphics.

The significance of this can’t be understated. The demo shows that the future version of Windows is running, although there’s no telling when it will arrive. And the fact that it can run on both Intel and ARM hardware means that Microsoft stands poised to get its Windows software into PCs, phones, and tablet computers now.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For Joe Morris, vice president of mobile content for game company Konami, the difference between having to port a game to 200 platforms and just a handful is more than enough reason to get excited over Intel launching its application-distribution platform, AppUp.

“It’s extremely difficult to get our content out there on every platform and do it in a financially responsible way, but that’s the only way to do it now,” Morris said. “AppUp is a huge step forward in that regard.”

AppUp provides app developers with a distribution platform for apps that use Intel’s Atom processors — which Intel hopes will show up in just about everything. The new app distribution platform already had about 450,000 users in beta before it launched today.

Intel’s latest line of Atom processors sporting the Havok engine SDK look like they could beat up Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Apple’s A4, a chip used in the iPad and iPhone 4 in a barroom brawl. Add to that support for Adobe’s Flash technology, which about 70 percent of games on the Internet run on. With those factors, it looks like there’s room for movement toward a unified platform under Intel’s banner.

But assuming AppUp is as successful as other major distribution platforms — a big assumption — it would leave users with three or four significant marketplaces to get apps: Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, and Intel’s AppUp — and no unified platform in sight. It’s probably not even expected, as both the Apple App Store and Android Market have been wildly popular with both users and developers.

Having multiple app stores is a barier to smaller developers trying to get their apps noticed. Not only does it force developers to create an app for multiple platforms, they have to market it to sometimes radically different audiences.

“You have a lot of small, independent developers that think they are going to make a trillion dollars off their latest and greatest app, and [instead they] get around $1.07 in their first month after launch because of how hard it is to be discovered,” said Eric Wittman, director of Flash platform services for Adobe.

It all depends on just how many devices the Atom processor makes it into. Intel demoed an Internet-connected treadmill, a racing bike that streamed information live to a pit crew, interactive advertisements and signs and even new ways to store photos and videos. Intel says the possibilities are endless, and they probably are — though it raises the question of whether the same app can really run on such diverse devices.

If apps can make it to even the most remote parts of everyday life, a unified platform for that alone might do enough for small and large developers alike might solve the marketing nightmare that is app fragmentation.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 15. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.