The console is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chip and also packs “a console-grade controller,” a five-inch, high-def multitouch display, speakers, Wi-Fi and the Jelly Bean flavor of Android. It also has 16 gigabytes of memory, GPS, Bluetooth, HDMI output, microSD storage slot and a headphone jack.

“These pieces, put together by a company full of gaming fanatics, add up to an amazing new open platform gaming portable,” Nvidia said. “It’s the best way to play Android games. And because it’s an Android device, it works with both Tegra-optimized and regular Android games — as well as Android apps.”

On top of that, Nvidia also said Shield includes a “beta” feature that will allow the streaming of games from a PC.

Nvidia, which first announced its Project Shield effort in January, said it will take orders starting today for those who had been getting email updates on the effort, with general public orders to begin May 20. It will ship in June and will be sold at Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers.

Shield is not alone in seeing the opportunity to combine console gaming and Android. The chipmaker is joining a growing field of Android-based game consoles, which includes the Kickstarter-backed (and now venture-backed) Ouya and the GamePop from BlueStacks.

For the current quarter, the company forecast revenue of $975 million, plus or minus 2 percent, implying a range of between $955.5 million and $994.5 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters most recently expected $1.01 billion.

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The chip maker’s shareholder returns for the year will include its regular quarterly dividend of 7.5 cents, amounting to about $50 million a quarter.

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The chip maker calls the forthcoming product the Grid Visual Computing Appliance, a server-style device that is packed with Nvidia technology and runs software that normally requires expensive workstations that typically reside in company offices.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But here at AllThingsD we want you to have a pretty good idea what to expect even before things kick off in Barcelona. We’ve been noodling around to find out what all the big companies have planned for next week. And, as we noted yesterday, plenty of companies aren’t waiting to spill the beans.

So here’s a company-by-company look at what to expect. And this is just the start of our Mobile World Congress reporting. Ina Fried and Bonnie Cha will be in Espana to put things into context and dig around for more dirt.

Apple

As usual, the Cupertino-based company will be the talk of the town and yet nowhere to be found.

AT&T

AT&T is using the stage in Barcelona to talk about its progress in moving mobile beyond the phone. On the business side, Ma Bell now has a half-billion-dollar business helping companies add mobile products such as rugged devices and embedded cellular technology. At the show, AT&T is working with OnAsset to embed cellular modules for high-value package tracking.

Google

Google never made any huge announcements at Mobile World Congress, but its circus-like booth was always a big attraction. Alas, there will be no free smoothies, trips down the slide or pin-trading this year.

HTC

The Taiwanese phone maker made its big news earlier this week in New York, but is expected to have its usual presence at the show, though it won’t have a huge news conference.

Immersion

The haptics company is showing off new ways of adding touch feedback into mobile devices, including the ability for phone makers to more deeply integrate feel into their user interface.

Intel

Intel is showing off its dual-core processor, and is also expected to announce some new phone designs and tout its work in emerging markets.

LG

Similar to last year, LG is making a slew of announcements just ahead of the show. Over the past couple of weeks, the Korean manufacturer has debuted the LG Optimus G Pro, Optimus L Series II, Optimus F5 and Optimus F7. Still, the company might have a thing or two left up its sleeve. A press conference is scheduled for Monday morning.

Motorola

Mobile World Congress has never been a big show for Motorola, and that’s not going to change this year. So, for those of you who were hoping for your first sighting of the Google-Motorola X Phone, sorry to disappoint.

Nokia

With its flagship Lumia 920 still in the process of being introduced around the world, expect Nokia to concentrate its efforts around expanding its Windows Phone lineup to better combat the threat of low-end Android. That also means beefing up the company’s Asha mobile phone business, which has been seeking to evolve from feature phone to an entry-level smartphone. The Finnish phone maker has a press conference set for Monday morning.

Nvidia

The chipmaker plans to show off the Phoenix, a reference-design phone built around the Tegra 4i, the company’s first processor with LTE capabilities built in.

Orange

France Telecom’s wireless unit is debuting several new devices under its own brand, including the Lumo — the first Orange-branded LTE phone — and the San Remo, a large-screen 4.7-inch smartphone. A third phone, the Orange Nivo, targets younger buyers and first-time smartphone buyers.

Qualcomm

The Snapdragon 800 chip was announced at CES in January, but Qualcomm will use Mobile World Congress to show off some previously undisclosed abilities of the chip, including always-on voice control and even faster device charging.

Samsung

Samsung used to put on over-the-top press conferences at Mobile World Congress (think aerial acrobats and dance troupes). But the company started to scale back last year, preferring instead to launch flagship products like the Samsung Galaxy S III on its own. The case will be the same for the much-anticipated Galaxy S IV, but it’s rumored that Samsung will unveil the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet in Barcelona.

Sony

Sony introduced its latest flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z, at CES in January, so the chances of seeing another high-end handset are slim. That said, the company does have an event planned for Monday morning. It’s quite possible that Sony may use that time to reveal additional markets and availability for the Xperia Tablet Z, which has currently only been announced for Japan.

Visa

Visa is announcing a new “Visa Ready” program on Friday, designed to turn potential technology rivals into partners. The program will see Visa certify payment hardware and NFC devices to work with Visa’s infrastructure. Expect more specific partner announcements in Barcelona.

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But, as often happens as trade shows grow, that also means it is harder and harder to be heard through the noise, prompting many companies to avoid making their biggest announcements during the event. Between that and the expense, lots of companies are looking for other venues for their product launches.

HTC, for example, chose to launch its new One phone earlier this week in New York. Samsung hasn’t said when it will launch its next Galaxy S IV (though it’s rumored to be in March) but it for sure won’t come in Barcelona.

For its part, HTC said it will have a roughly similar presence in Barcelona. It will still have a big booth and approximately the same number of people attending the show, said Americas head Mike Woodward. However, it wanted its HTC One not to be just one of many products lost in the crush of news.

Google, meanwhile, is scaling back its massive booth presence, which in past years featured a giant slide, pin giveaways and a rotating sushi bar of Android devices. Also, for the first time in three years, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, will not deliver a keynote address at the show.

Similarly, Microsoft, which had previously used Mobile World Congress to unveil major products like Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7, does not have a major press conference planned.

Even many companies that are debuting products at the event are making announcements ahead of time. The major cellphone chip makers have all recently unveiled new products they will demo in Barcelona.

The strategy isn’t totally new. Last year, for example, LG seemed to announce a new phone each day ahead of the show — a practice the company is continuing this year. In the past couple of weeks, LG has already revealed the Optimus G Pro and Optimus L Series II.

But that’s not to say there won’t be tons of new products. Nokia, LG and Sony all have media events and are expected to launch new hardware.

Mobile World Congress remains a key place to see and be seen, especially for companies that are trying to make the case they are serious about mobile — chipmakers like Broadcom and Intel and device makers such as Huawei and ZTE.

The show officially kicks off on Monday, Feb. 25, and both of us will be there to report on all the action, so stay tuned for more.

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And at Mobile World Congress next week, the chipmaker is showing off two more features of the forthcoming processor.

First off, it will have an integrated voice-processing capability that sets the stage for devices that can always be activated via a command. The catchphrase, which can be customized by the phone maker, requires no press of a button, and can even wake a phone that is in standby or airplane mode.

Secondly, Qualcomm is introducing the second generation of its rapid-charging capability. The initial version, included in 70 devices, allowed phones and tablets to charge up to 40 percent faster. The 2.0 version of the technology will allow devices to charge up to 75 percent faster, meaning that tablets that normally take more than seven hours to charge can fully charge in less than three hours.

The chipmaker says there are more than 55 phones and tablets in development using the Snapdragon 800, with the initial ones due in the second half of 2013.

Qualcomm is, of course, not the only processor maker hoping to make news in Barcelona. Rival Nvidia is using next week’s show to detail its first LTE-integrated processor, while Intel plans to show its dual-core processor and new efforts aimed at emerging markets.

Nvidia is announcing on Tuesday the Tegra 4i, its first chip to integrate a modem that can support LTE network capabilities. The chip is now sampling, with a few phones using the chip expected in the fourth quarter, and more in the first quarter of 2014.

The chip packs a quad-core processor based on ARM’s Cortex A9 design, along with a fifth core for low-power operation and as a graphics processor engine with 60 cores and the LTE modem.

Nvidia plans to show a reference-design phone, code-named Phoenix, at the Mobile World Congess event that runs next week in Barcelona.

Broadcom announced its LTE plans last week, with a high-end chip expected to ship next year.

But the company gave a weak revenue outlook for the fiscal first quarter. For the current quarter, the company projected revenue of around $940 million, below the recent $1.07 billion consensus estimate from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Thing is, the biggest debuts haven’t been the stuff you’ll find on Best Buy shelves. It’s the stuff powering the stuff on those shelves. That is to say, it’s the processor guys’ day in the sun, as some of the largest names in the components industry are pushing more powerful chips in the new year, with sights set directly on mobile devices.

It’s telling of a sea change when Qualcomm — hardly a premier consumer electronics company by any stretch — takes over the keynote reins from Microsoft, the longstanding CES headliner of the past 12 years. That brought Qualcomm’s big debut of the night, the new Snapdragon 800 and 600 series of quad-core mobile chips, which will see a boost in graphics and general performance upwards of 75 percent compared to its current chip line.

More-powerful, less-energy-sucking chipsets: It’s the exact direction the chip industry is headed, brought on by the influx of smartphones, tablets, netbooks and Ultrabooks over the past five years. These days, consumers expect a high-performance smartphone capable of running the latest graphics-heavy apps while still delivering a battery charge longer than a handful of hours.

Nvidia, a California-based chipmaker long known for its graphical processing prowess, has done well for itself in the low-power consumption arena in recent years. The company’s Tegra 3 chips are found in a number of high-end Android smartphones currently on the market, and on Sunday, Nvidia unveiled the Tegra 4 line of chips, which aims at even more power and lower energy consumption than its predecessor line.

Nvidia, Qualcomm and others have used the past few years to get the jump on Intel — the veritable Goliath of the chip industry — by licensing chipset architectures from the British ARM Holdings company, which specializes in low-power chipset designs. Samsung, too, uses the ARM-based architecture, and on Wednesday it unveiled the Exynos 5 Octa line, an eight-core mobile chip, again aimed at mobile devices.

Intel’s problem: The company has long specialized in producing the latest and greatest in powerhouse processors, and has dominated the desktop market doing so. But as we slowly transition from a desktop-centric world to a mobile-centric one, Intel has struggled to adapt as quickly as some of its competitors.

Of course, Intel wants to escape that image and regain share. That’s the impetus behind Intel’s mobile-centric Atom series in recent times, and the new “Lexington” and “Bay Trail” chips that debuted at CES on Monday.

Don’t get too excited quite yet, components nerds. As is the case at most every CES, all the stuff we’re seeing unveiled is still rather vaporous, not hitting the market until the second half of 2013 at the earliest.

For now, we’ll have to make do with current-gen power expectations and performance, and see which chip giants actually make good on their promises come next Christmas.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Intel has dominated the high-end, performance-oriented desktop space for years, producing some of the most powerful chips on the market.

Problem is, desktops are so last decade. The age of mobile computing was ushered in on the backs of millions of pallets of laptops, netbooks, smartphones and tablets. And the chips that Intel has classically produced just don’t do low-power, low-consumption like those of some of its competitors. CEO Paul Otellini is widely seen as having been nudged out of his job for missing the boat on this shift away from PCs.

So once again at CES in Las Vegas, Intel is reminding the world that yes, it can translate its technology over to mobile and do it well.

The company plans to roll out a new smartphone platform aimed at the low end of the Android market with its “Lexington” project. Intel has its “Bay Trail” quad-core Atom chip on the way to cover the high-end smartphones. New chips to come, too, for the Ultrabooks the company has so loudly trumpeted over the past year. It’s all supposed to last longer, work better and just plain beat competitors like Nvidia and others using ARM-based architecture.

Intel gave us a peek at the way this will work in December, when it revealed a new manufacturing process for making mobile chips using Tri-Gate transistors.

It’ll just take ’em a little while. Most of this stuff won’t hit the market until the 2013 holiday season. Yes, a full year from now.

At the very least, Intel had a few partners on board to show off. For the low-end smartphones, Acer, Safaricom and Lava will use Intel’s forthcoming platform. And some analysts think that however far off, this is a smart play for Intel.

“The Lexington platform is absolutely targeted at emerging regions, which will let Intel deliver a more functional phone than others like, say, a Qualcomm or a Mediatek,” Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moore Strategy & Insights, told me. “Combined with some of the higher-end features they’re bringing to the low-end phones, they’ll undoubtedly pick up customers with this silicon.”

But we’ll still have to wait until Christmas to see most of this stuff, while competitors like Nvidia continue to introduce subsequent generations of their successful mobile products.

Perhaps by then, the latest and greatest phones you’re seeing launch today might be outdated enough for you to pick up a new one. That’s Intel’s hope, at least.

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Nvidia, the company responsible for much of the guts inside modern smartphones, tablets and desktop PCs, unveiled “Project Shield” at International CES in Las Vegas on Sunday evening, a prototype portable gaming system built atop the Android platform.

It’s something of a multimedia mish-mash. Imagine tossing an Xbox controller, a five5-inch 720p display, the guts of a powerful quad-core tablet and a wireless speaker box into a blender, then cranking it up to “frappe.” The result is Nvidia’s foray into creating an out-of-the-box consumer-facing product, Project Shield.

The device casts a wide net. It runs media like HD movies and music, while also running apps like Hulu, Netflix and Internet radio services. It can play PC games. It will run any Android games in the Google Play store.

In other words, it’s competing with smartphones, tablets, handheld systems like the Wii U — everyone.

Consider this: It’s hard enough for an industry player to do well in just one of these spaces. Apple and Samsung are duking it out for smartphone dominance, while Apple continues to clean up in the tablet arena. Consoles and dedicated gaming hardware is still a battlefield split among giants like Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, yet console sales are declining in recent years, and the dominant players are beginning to experiment to fight for share.

So where does Project Shield fit in? Does Nvidia focus on marketing it toward one of these verticals, or all of them? Or is this something new entirely?

For now, at least, Nvidia can focus on one thing: Finishing it. After all, it’s still a just a prototype.

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The chip, known as the MT6589, also includes graphics and wireless communications functions and is aimed at the mid tier and higher ends of the smartphone and tablet markets. It is now being designed into products that will ship starting in the first quarter of next year, MediaTek said.

“Up to this point, the story for Mediatek has been about transition from feature phones into smartphones,” MediaTek’s Finbarr Moynihan said in an interview. Moynihan said with the arrival of this chip, MediaTek can now compete in more than just the entry level of the market.

Mediatek is far from alone in having a quad-core chip. Nvidia has been selling its quad-core Tegra 3 for a while now, while Qualcomm also has a quad-core mobile chip.

What sets Mediatek apart, Moynihan said, is that its quad-core chip also bundles the graphics and modem functions all in a single package that can enable lower-cost device than its rivals.

Mediatek is in the midst of trying to establish itself as a global player in the smartphone market. The company shipped 550 million phone processors in 2011, but all but 10 million of those were for lower-end feature phones.

It will ship somewhere in the same ballpark of phone processors this year, but somewhere north of 100 million of those will be for smartphones. Thus far, most of its smartphone processors have gone into Chinese Android devices, though it has also made inroads in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Several things are fueling MediaTek’s growth. First and foremost is the explosion of Android itself, both the Google-blessed version and the modified forms typically used by Chinese makers.

The company’s low-cost chips are a key as well, but Moynihan says it isn’t all about price. MediaTek says its quad-core approach, while perhaps not delivering the most raw performance, offers power advantages that mean its chips can operate using all four cores for longer.

Showing a video of rival processors heating up under intense multicore use, Moynihan says its quad-core chip can stay cool thanks to its low-power ARM A7 processors.

But MediaTek will also find increasing competition as it tries to move up into the mainstream smartphone market. Qualcomm is a huge player there, with Broadcom and Intel also looking to find their way in and Nvidia in the mix as well.

Broadcom last week announced its first LTE-capable chip, a necessity to play in most of the U.S. market. MediaTek hopes to have such a chip a year from now. The initial quad-core chip will support HSPA+, the kind of network used by T-Mobile, as well as TD-SCDMA — a key 3G standard in China.

Moynihan notes that a lack of LTE limits its market here in the states but notes that globally LTE is still just getting going.

“The U.S. is certainly a challenge for MediaTek today,” Moynihan said, noting that the company also doesn’t have chips that support the CDMA technology used by Sprint and Verizon. “Europe is a little easier for us. They really haven’t adopted LTE as aggressively.”

Then American systems made a comeback. An IBM-made system called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, took the No. 1 spot. That machine is now No. 2 in the world. Six months later — for that is how often the list is updated — another American system has taken the crown.

This one is called Titan, and it is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It was built by Cray, and is bolstered significantly with GPU chips from Nvidia. It is powerful enough to conduct 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second. Let me express that numerically: 17,590,000,000,000,000. Titan has 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

The headline on this system and what makes it indicative of certain wider trends in computing is that most of the computing horsepower in Titan comes not from the traditional CPUs — in this case the AMD Opterons — but from the Nvida GPUs. Getting to the top of the supercomputing world was part of a plan that Oak Ridge announced about a year ago, and from the the start, Nvidia GPU chips were a key piece of the strategy.

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a chip that’s really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, and it does it much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD that you’d find inside a PC or server. They also do these math problems using less power — electrical power — than CPUs.

GPUs were originally designed for gaming and to make professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists — all of those are big floating point operations. Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel on a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster, which is lots of small computational jobs carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and CPU chips aren’t as good at the parallel stuff as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one.

American computers now constitute five of the top 10 on the Top 500 list, as well as slightly more than half — 251, to be exact — of the entire list. Systems in Asia number 122, and systems in Europe number 105.

Here’s a screen grab of the top 10 systems on the list. You can go through the full list here.

For the current quarter, the company expects revenue of $1.03 billion to $1.18 billion, short of the $1.21 billion estimate from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That’s one cynical way to interpret the story from Bloomberg News saying that Apple is exploring ways to move its Macintosh line of computers away from Intel’s chips and toward using its own internally designed line of chips.

Apple’s last shift in chip technology happened during 2005 and 2006, when it pivoted away from the old IBM-made PowerPC architecture and instead embraced Intel’s processors, which already run inside most of the world’s personal computers.

One side benefit that resulted was that Macs soon had the ability to optionally run Microsoft Windows and other operating systems, too. One of the most popular software products for the Mac is Parallels, a virtualization program that allows users to install and run Windows side by side on the Mac.

Bloomberg’s story says that Apple engineers have “grown confident” that its own line of chips — the current top of the line is the A6X inside the newest iPad — will eventually have enough computing muscle to run a full-featured Mac, and not just an iPad or iPhone.

Such a change would no doubt hurt Intel, already fighting to maintain its spot as one of the tech industry’s agenda-setting companies, as the PC market contracts and its lack of participation in the mobile market becomes ever more glaring.

The thinking goes that, in time, Apple will want to offer a more unified computing environment across all of its platforms — phones, tablets and PCs — and one key way to make that happen is to have a single chip architecture inside them all.

It isn’t crazy, and you just know that somewhere in some lab in Cupertino or Austin, there is a hopped-up prototype Mac running some weird iteration of OS X on some hopped-up prototype A-chip, just to see if it can be done. As the late Steve Jobs once said about the prospect of switching to Intel, but before it happened: “We like to have options.”

Certain pieces of the puzzle are in place; others have yet to be properly put in place, none of them impossible. Probably the most important one was the introduction by ARM — the British chip designer whose cores form the basic designs around which Apple’s A5, A6 and A6X chips are built — of the Cortex A57 and A53 cores last month.

These are the first 64-bit ARM cores ever, and being 64-bit capable is a must for a Mac. Why? Memory. A 64-bit chip can address a lot of memory, much more than an older 32-bit chip can. Take the base configuration of a MacBook Pro. It ships with eight gigabytes of DRAM memory on board and, depending on the model, can be expanded to 16GB. The iMac maxes out at 32GB of RAM. The muscular Mac Pros can in some configurations take up to 6GB of RAM. All that RAM requires a 64-bit chip, and before last month, a chip based on an ARM core couldn’t get there. Now it can.

The fundamental problem will be one of performance. Intel’s history of chip designs have always tended to emphasize boosting the overall computing power of a chip, and it has done this better than anyone else. There’s a reason that Intel chips are found in most of the world’s PCs servers.

And while I’m painting this in broad brushstrokes, this emphasis on computing muscle has, over the years, caused Intel to lag ARM-based chips when it comes to power efficiency. In the same way there’s a reason that Intel chips are inside most of the worlds PCs and servers, there’s a reason that ARM-based chips, built by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, and now Apple, are inside most of the world’s mobile phones, smartphones and tablets.

So it would seem that the state of play right now has the best chip going where it’s best suited. Intel chips go in Macs, and ARM-based A5, A6 and A6X chips go in the iPad and the iPhone. Each is the best tool for the task at hand.

But could ARM designs catch up with Intel enough that an ARM chip could be as good — or better, as it would have to be — to knock Intel out of the Mac, as the Bloomberg story suggests? They could. I talked with analyst Nathan Brookwood about this. He said that while ARM chips generally don’t match Intel’s on performance right now, Apple has the in-house expertise to design one that could get there. It would take a few years, but it could be done. “There’s no reason that an Intel chip couldn’t arbitrarily be made to have the same power efficiency as an ARM chip. There’s also no reason that an ARM chip couldn’t be faster, with the right hardware resources brought to bear,” he told me. “It’s all a matter of implementation.”

If a company decided it wanted to design an ARM chip that was, as Brookwood put it, “hell-bent on performance,” it could be done. “You could get a pretty fast machine,” he says.

Trouble is, it would have to be not only be fast, but have a really excellent road map, lasting well into the future, that not only met but exceeded that of Intel. That’s a tall, tall order.

And there would, of course, be numerous complications, none of them insurmountable.

Remember that when Apple shifted from PowerPC to Intel, it had to provide a cushion to all those software developers. Software written for the old chip had to work on the new, and vice versa. This was done primarily through emulating the old chip on the new. Apple called the technology Rosetta.

It turns out that there’s a path for a new Rosetta-like technology on ARM. A Russian start-up company called Elbrus Technologies has developed emulation technology that allows an ARM chip to run software developed for Intel’s x86 chips. (Read about it here, at EETimes.) Advantage ARM.

What about Intel? It has advantages, too, none of them trivial. One is the best record in the world of consistently delivering chips that outrun every other chip in the world, when it comes to raw performance. It also has the world’s best chip-manufacturing technology and expertise. And it has the benefit of a fruitful, seven-year relationship with Apple.

It’s a toss-up for now. If the environment shifts in such a way that ARM designs are bolstered by Apple’s own considerable and growing chip-design expertise, and its desire to rely less and less on outside partners to control its destiny, Apple could indeed move the Mac to an ARM-based chip of its own design.

If it does happen, it will not happen quickly. It would take at least two years, and then, if history is any guide, the transitional phase during which software developers and customers alike would have to have their hands held would last another two years. It is something that Apple does well.

Another thing that Apple does well: The precise opposite of what some rumors suggest it will. The story is properly hedged with the classic “to be sure” paragraph that says no final decision has been made on any of this. The speculation will grind on via the rumor mills. And until there’s more evidence on the table that this transition is happening, my advice is to treat it as nothing more than that: A rumor.

Let’s get to the Surface first. (That’s a picture of it taken apart, at right.) With a base price of $499 for a 32 gigabyte Surface without the Touch Cover accessory, IHS estimates that the cost of components used to build it amount to $271 for a starter 32GB model, without the cover. The main components include a Tegra 3 processor chip from Nvidia, and a display and memory chips from Samsung. (Of course, Microsoft is probably buying memory chips from more than one vendor.)

Analyst Andrew Rassweiler, who led the IHS teardown team, said that Microsoft is using the relatively low entry price as a base, in hope of enticing consumers to buy higher-end models with the Touch Cover and higher memory capacity. The Touch Cover, which my colleague Walt Mossberg liked in his review of the Surface, costs $120 when purchased separately, and is bundled with the higher-end models.

Rassweiler estimates the cost of the parts used to build the Touch Cover at about $16, making it appear to be pretty profitable. It contains chips from Atmel and Freescale Semiconductor, he says. “It’s a compelling accessory for users to have, and a great example of a way in which manufacturers get consumers interested with a base price, and hope they’ll impulsively opt for extra features that make more profit,” he told me. Accessories always have higher profit margins than the devices they are intended to be sold with, Rassweiler says, and protective cases for phones and tablets always tend to sell well.

One big winner with the Surface appears to be Samsung. With one key exception — building the main processor chips — Samsung has been pushed out of Apple’s iPad and iPhone products. For the Surface, Samsung supplied the display, the memory chips and the battery, amounting to about $137, or about half of the $271 bill-of-materials (BOM) cost.

Now, on to the Kindle Fire HD. (Seen in its exploded view at right; click to make bigger.) Recall that the last Kindle Fire to get the teardown treatment came in with a cost estimate of $202 (later revised down to about $187) against a retail price of $199, meaning that Amazon was close or near to losing money on the hardware, and was hoping to make it back on the sale of content from its digital store, and even on sales of physical goods from its retail store. One estimate earlier this year suggested that Amazon makes more than $100 off each Kindle Fire. It’s probably pretty close to breakeven, if slightly profitable this time around, Rassweiler told me. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the devices are sold at cost.

Like the old one, the new Kindle Fire HD sells for a starting price of $199, and carries a combined cost of components of $165, according to IHS estimates. Key suppliers are LG Display, which made the screen; Texas Instruments, which repeated its role as the supplier of the main processing chip, plus power and video chips; and Samsung, which provided the memory.

At this point, it’s probably worth looking back at a few more teardowns we’ve written about in recent memory, though its worth pointing out that the cost of components come down over time. In fact, manufacturers depend on that, because a product becomes more profitable as the parts used in them get cheaper. Anyway, here are a few previous teardowns: Apple’s iPhone 5; Samsung’s Galaxy Note Tablet; Google’s Nexus 7 Tablet; and Apple’s iPad with Retina display, circa March of this year.

The company has hardware designs ready, but won’t ship them until next year.

“We thought about it,” Acer computer unit president Campbell Kan said in an interview. “We do have products ready.”

For now, though, Acer is going with a lineup of touch-centric laptops, tablets and all-in-ones, all powered by Intel chips.

Maybe that’s why Intel CEO Paul Otellini happily boasts about his experience with a touch-based Windows 8 laptop from Acer.

Other PC makers are hedging their bets. Longtime Intel customer Dell, for example, has a convertible tablet using a Qualcomm processor, while Nvidia is powering Microsoft’s Surface and Lenovo.

While not straying outside the processor mainstream, Acer has bet heavily on touch, saying it is a necessary ingredient for a good Windows 8 experience.

Without it, “it makes no sense.” The challenge, Kan said, is that few people have really played with Windows and touch. “When you start to use Windows 8, you will figure out you couldn’t live without touch.”

And now there are two more to add to the list.

Joining the lineup are Mike Bell, the former Apple and Palm executive who now heads Intel’s effort to get back into the smartphone chip game; and Carlos Domingo, head of leading international carrier Telefónica’s R&D.

The two-day conference runs Oct. 29 and 30; other speakers include Google Android chieftain Andy Rubin, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and top executives from Facebook, WhatsApp and Verizon.

In addition, there will be an array of non-U.S. speakers who will ensure that this year’s Global Edition lives up to its name. (To get more information about attending in person, click here.)

Mike Bell has a big task ahead of him as he attempts to help Intel crack the market for smartphone processors — a field that is today dominated by ARM-based chips from Qualcomm, Nvidia and Texas Instruments. Intel has made some strides, landing initial design wins at Motorola, ZTE and Lenovo, along with some lesser-known names.

Bell also brings a wealth of tech industry experience, joining Intel in 2010 from Palm, where he headed product development efforts for the webOS-based Pixi and Pre devices.

Before that, Bell was at Apple from 2001 to 2007, and contributed to the iPhone, iMac and Apple TV projects.

To get a flavor for Bell, here’s a video interview from earlier this year: