There are a few sets of companies which have made chip design cheaper as well as easier. ARM has allowed virtually any company to make processor. IP providers are more standard now with TSMC/ARM and others providing standard libraries to everyone. EDA companies have automated the chip design flow. Intel has most of the things as proprietary : libraries, processor instruction set(besides AMD) and CAD tools. this is something which they have established during the era of the PC dominance....now all the other companies don't have this luxury. It is like IOs vs Android. Andriod manufacturers are having a tough time in differentiating......and that's why there is reduction in profits........ it is truly commoditized. On top of it Asian manufacturers have made the whole thing very cheap due to cheap labor compared to US.
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Anonymous84108 - you nailed it
People need to get over the myth that Asian manufactures have a cost advantage over companies elsewhere. Most ARM processors, including Apple-A8, are made in Taiwan or Korea . The cost basis is the same for any company. TSMC/ARM kits made it possible for just about anyone to make mobile AP cheaply. No one have advantage and no one has disadvantage. This just means that QC chip revenue has reached a peak. So, what superior technology does QC hold?
Citation? The whole point is that the secret sauce doesn't matter as much. Only phone brand. Gateway had their cute little cow print boxes for 90s PCs, but everybody knew it was powered by Intel Inside. Doesn't work like that for mobile. From the average consumer perspective, there's no difference between chipset vendors. Smartphones and tablets are doomed to incremental updates every 3-6 months. Soon everybody will be on 14/16 nm, everybody will have good enough LTE modem, everybody will have cortex A72 or something similar. Somebody will need to blow the smartphone platform up in a few years by getting some augmented reality headset thing right, where all the computer vision and cognitive computing hoopla makes sense. Til then, it's candy crush and twitter feeds.
Yes, QC has great propriety technology like everyone else who is building ARM AP’s. TSMC, SMIC, and all contract foundries are customizing their process for mobile AP’s. Technology is readily available for anyone to plug into. You don’t see much competition for Intel, although there is a $50billion market.
Qualcomm has great proprietary technology over and above all the rest.
So well put