In 1995, Dragon Ball running at a speed of 16.58MHz was adopted by the new kid on the block, PALM. It created a new niche in the semi-conductor industry called, Applications Processor (AP). Who would have imagined that AP would go on to become an integral component of many embedded systems like cell phones, GPS, and personal medial players.
In nutshell, Application Processor is a highly integrated micro-controller with gazillion interfaces. It can hook up with all sort of memory and storage like DDR, Flash, NOR, ATA. In addition, high-end processors, embed dedicated graphics, audio, video, and image accelerators for lower power consumption. They are targeted for a range of device from cell phones to portable navigation systems.
In the beginning, Dragon Ball was a developed by a small team of engineers in Motorola. The company itself did not anticipate its success. However, as it often happens, success breeds a sense of invincibility and complacency. Motorola ignored the requirements and feedback of its customers. TI and Intel entered the market with a bang with ARM based OMAP and StrongARM/XScale application processors. They offered added qualities of more speed, integration and a broader portfolio. One by one, Palm, Treo and others adopted OMAP and XScale. Along the way, Dell and HP jumped into the PDA business with Intel's AP.
Meanwhile, Motorola was actively developing MCORE as the belated replacement for the venerable 68x core. Feeling the heat from the OMAP and XScale, Motorola finally folded MCORE development and adopted ARM in the newer Dragon Ball rollouts. It subsequently relabeled the product line as i.MX.
The market for AP is big. Over the past few years, many new players have jumped into the bandwagon. Marvell eager to enter the handset market, bought the XScale based PXA portfolio from Intel in 2006 for over $600 million. This had given Marvell a foothold into the handset world.
Video and graphics processing are an integral feature of the high end AP's. Hence, it is natural for the graphics chipmakers like NVIDIA to enter the business. NVIDIA penetrated the market with the acquisition of Portal Player. Portal Player was once supplying chips for the iPod. Post acquisition, NVIDIA has now come out with ARM11 based Tegra APX running at 750MHz. It incorporates NVIDIA GeForce mobile graphics core and can play HD 720p video on a mobile device.
Qualcomm who had been making communication ASICs using ARM cores decided to take a step forward and introduced an ARM based Scorpion core running at 1GHz. However, it is unclear whether Qualcomm will market Scorpion as a standalone AP or will continue to provide it as part of its Snapdragon mobile platform.
Samsung is a late entrant, but had won Apple business by leveraging the Nand Flash portfolio. Samsung had combined the AP and nand flash into a single multi chip package. iPhone and other MP3 players uses Samsung AP's. It is debatable for how long Apple will stick with Samsung. In 2008, Apple bought PA Semi for $278 million with a possibility of replacing its existing suppliers with in house developed chips.
Many players can coexist in this market, but will eat into each other’s margins. Processors from second and third tier players like ST, NXP and Renesas will not gain traction. The bottom line for success; more features with less power in the smallest possible die.
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