LAS VEGAS – Henry Samueli, co-founder and CTO of Broadcom, during one-on-one with
EE Times, identified Ultra HDTV, gigabit wireless and "Wi-Fi in everything" as three key trends at the Consumer Electronics Show of 2013.
Of the three, the gigabit data-rate connection (802.11ac) to home is particularly important for the electronics industry, Samueli observed. “It changes the game” for carriers, systems and home networks. “Gigabit to the home is a no-brainer. DOCSIS 3.0 is ready, and it will proliferate within the next three years,” he said. The gigabit data rate in a home network is also happening via Ethernet, power line, gigabit Wi-Fi and MoCA, he added.
“While we are still far from enabling gigabit wireless on clients (handhelds),” Samueli believes it would eventually have an impact on how chips inside a handset are partitioned.
Samueli predicted that the gigabit connection could move to “the cloud” some of the processing – be it graphics rendering or display processing -- currently executed in a client’s CPU, prompting the industry to redefine what CPUs in a handset should do. Speaking of today’s chip companies racing to add more processing cores to handhelds, Samueli said, “My view is we may be overdoing the CPU war."
Following is an excerpt of the conversation with Samueli at the CES.
