高通的真正威胁根本不是英特尔或三星

三星最新处理器芯片Exynos对高通构不成威胁，高通不会因三星或英特尔而受损，它真正的危机是其IP授权业务的任何动摇，一旦公司分拆，高通这种特殊的成功的商业模式将受到严重威胁。

Summary

Samsung's new Exynos chip is not a significant threat to Qualcomm. Qualcomm's vulnerability isn't to Samsung or Intel. The true risk is any faltering in its own intellectual property effort. Qualcomm's exceptionally successful business model would be seriously threatened by one thing only - a company break up.

Telecommunications and semiconductor giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) has made a fortune out of its wireless wizardry. But the stock price has slid year-to-date 30%, shaving its market cap to $79.16 billion. As the company's stock has fallen, market chatter has become increasingly alarmist. In fact, a new "reason for alarm" just cropped up that has investors concerned.

What happened? On November 12, Samsung (OTC:SSNLF) announced its new flagship chipset, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890.

A few days later, a supposedly "leaked" Geekbench result chart showed the new Exynos had an advantage in multi-core scores over the Snapdragon 820. What I hope Qualcomm's current and prospective investors realize is that a benchmark test is not the same as a product test. It's just like comparing two football teams on paper and expecting that to tell you which one will win the game. Good luck with that.

But what about Qualcomm's other competitors? At the last Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) developer conference, an onstage demo was staged showing how a phone equipped with Intel's RealSense cameras could scan a living room in 3D in seconds. Clearly, Intel is hoping the technology might give them a chance to finally make inroads into mobile.

Since the field of computer vision is huge, and the capabilities are bound to end up in phones, robots, drones and anything else you can think of, I'm going to defer that for another article. Intel and Qualcomm are hardly the only tech companies working on computer vision, and there are many other exciting investing possibilities that need to be looked at in that context.

And by the way, Qualcomm already beat Intel to this field. At Google's developer conference, Qualcomm came out with its own reference design for depth sensing in phones equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon mobile processors.

But while depth sensing is still in the future, Samsung's new chip is right now. The new Exynos chip will likely go into production by the end of the year and will presumably be used in some versions of the upcoming Galaxy S7.

So will Qualcomm be able to hold its ground, and even expand, in the face of some serious competition? As an investor in Qualcomm, I'm not the slightest bit alarmed and here's why.

First, Samsung has long been a competitor with Qualcomm, and like any good competitor, they bring out new products and get better. In addition, Samsung is limited by their business model. As an established company with broad interests, i.e., multiple product lines and operations, as well as the elements of design, manufacturing, R&D, sales and distribution, Samsung has too many other things pulling at it to beat Qualcomm in the chipset game.

Second, at the end of the day, Samsung's real focus is the Galaxy phone. If they can buy the part they want from Qualcomm at a price both can live with, they will do it. It takes a lot more company resources to actually get Galaxy S6, 7, 8, 9, etc., out the door than it does to make Exynos. And ge