It has been a long time since the days when AMD and Intel had cage matches with sideshows involving Motorola, Texas Instruments and Cyrix.  The surviving competitors are aged and a bit tired, now content for occasional one-upmanship as opposed to major battles.  Now the only real conflict is between their lawyers on the courtroom floor; there is nothing along the lines of the race for 1GHz or the bizarre non-sequiturs like the 686 processor.

Don’t be disenheartened, there is a new battleground opening up with a new generation of competitors.  The target is clear; thanks to CES 2010 we can see that the eBook is going to make it to the market this time and a new market means a wide open field for those who want to supply the components.  The major contenders are Samsung, Qualcomm, Freescale, and TI, the stakes are being the supplier for the CPU, networking, storage, display and the PCB for the major players in the market.  Now that it is clear this will be a successful market segment, keep your eyes out on what new advancements each company offers to tempt the eBook makers into choosing them.  Ars Technica has more.

“E-book readers are poised to replay the same evolution from single-function to multifunction to cloud client that the mobile phone has undergone, but they’ll do it even more rapidly. In the process, a battle is underway for the guts of devices.”

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