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Nvidia plans to ship its new Tegra system-on-a-chip for mobile devices by the middle of next year. The coming-out party for Tegra will be in the spring of 2009, said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s president and CEO, during a conference call to discuss its financial results. Announced earlier this year, Tegra puts an Arm processor core, a GeForce graphics core and other components, including a high-definition video decoder, onto a single chip. Tegra will put Nvidia in direct competition with Intel, which released its low-power Atom processors earlier this year. Apple is also taking a stab at the mobile chip market, using the acquisition of PA Semi earlier this year to develop systems-on-chips for the iPhone.
Google’s Android mobile platform doesn’t “bubble up to the top” of Microsoft’s list of toughest competitors to Windows Mobile in the market for smartphone OSes, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. Speaking at an investor day hosted by Australian telecommunications carrier Telstra, Ballmer said that it’s too early to tell if Android will ever be a serious competitor in the mobile market, where others have already marked considerable territory. Ballmer’s comments were made in response to a question about how he sees Google competitively in the mobile market. Ballmer had answered a previous question and cited Apple and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion as competitors to Microsoft, but did not mention Google.
Apple’s iPhone 3G passed Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry to take second place in third-quarter global smartphone rankings, according to a report by market researcher Canalys. Apple also edged out Microsoft in smartphone OSs, the report said. A record high 39.9 million smartphones were shipped globally in the July through September period, up 28 percent over the same time last year, according to Canalys. Smartphones now represent 13 percent of the total mobile handset market, up from 11 percent in the second quarter.
Wages for U.S. tech jobs fell significantly in the third quarter compared to the same period last year, the IT staffing company Yoh Services said Thursday.
Early in the third quarter, average wages actually went up by 1.86 percent compared to 2007, but ended up dropping 6.21 percent below 2007 levels as the quarter ended, Yoh said. The Philadelphia company’s Index of Technology Wages is released quarterly and covers the aviation, engineering, IT, manufacturing, scientific, telecom and utility sectors.
…And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.