Qualcomm has seen exploding revenues, now pushing $30 billion per annum and great profit margins. It is anything but a "commodity" market, and a few makers are

Qualcomm has seen exploding revenues, now pushing $30 billion per annum and great profit margins. It is anything but a "commodity" market, and a few makers are making gangbusters. That is almost entirely from sales for Android smartphones. Qualcomm's leading-edge baseband tech (and monopoly on 3GPP2/EvDO networks) has made them the clear market leader for phones. This is why both Intel and NVIDIA purchased cellular baseband technology (Infineon/Icera), tried to compete in phones for a year, and then pulled back to focus on tablets while they continue to develop basebands. Without a requirement for cellular, the tablet market is wide open. Like you said, these chips all run the exact same software and users can't tell the difference. It's a commodity market, and is Intel going to compete on price with NVIDIA, Samsung, Qualcomm, Marvell, MediaTek, Allwinner, etc? Not while making 65% gross margins.