SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s iPad mini uses a display from South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, one of Apple’s major suppliers and also its fiercest rival in the global mobile-device market that the two companies dominate.

Analysts say the Silicon Valley-based iPhone maker is trying to wean itself off its reliance on Samsung, as both giants are embroiled in a bitter international legal battle over mobile patents, for everything from microchips to displays.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 1 (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s new
iPad mini includes a display from South Korea’s Samsung
Electronics Co Ltd, a key supplier but also the
Silicon Valley tech giant’s fiercest rival in a global
mobile-device war.

The iPad mini, to be available in stores on Friday, also
includes Apple’s A5 processor, SK Hynix Inc flash
memory, a Broadcom touch controller and a number of
chips from Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc,
according to electronics repair company iFixit, which acquired
one early and opened it on Thursday.

LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – British chip designer ARM on Tuesday launched processors to power a new generation of smartphones and also offer low-energy solutions for servers, increasing its incursion into a market dominated by Intel.

The Cambridge-based company, whose technology is in Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S3, said its latest blueprints would deliver three times today’s processing power using the same amount of energy.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc plans to use technology from Britain’s ARM Holdings Plc to make energy-efficient processors for servers, a growing business that the troubled chipmaker hopes will help offset weakness in the struggling PC industry.

AMD will expand its push into the still-new microserver market, combining ARM’s architecture typically used in smartphones with the x86 architecture common in PCs and servers, Chief Executive Officer Rory Read said on Monday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – KLA-Tencor Corp (KLAC.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) posted fiscal first-quarter revenue below expectations and said current-quarter revenue would fall more as chipmakers, worried about the economy, hold off on new orders of manufacturing equipment.

The lower-than-expected outlook for the December quarter, including uncertainty about orders for new products, sent the company’s shares down more than 2 percent after-hours.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 25 (Reuters) – KLA-Tencor Corp
posted fiscal first-quarter revenue below expectations as
chipmakers, worried about the economy, held off on new orders of
manufacturing equipment.

With dwindling demand for PCs, Intel and memory
chipmakers have been scaling back investment plans for new
technology and manufacturing capacity, and Wall Street is trying
to determine when orders for new gear will begin to pick up.

SAN JOSE (Reuters) – Apple Inc will begin to sell an 8-inch version of the iPad on Friday to compete with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and other smaller tablets, but it set a higher-than-expected price tag of $329 that Wall Street fears could curb demand.

The 7.9 inch “iPad mini” marks the iPhone-maker’s first foray into the smaller-tablet segment. Apple hopes to beat back incursions onto its home turf of consumer electronics hardware, while safeguarding its lead in a larger tablet space – one that even deep-pocketed rivals like Samsung Electronics have found tough to penetrate.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple marketing wizard Phil Schiller defended the $329 price of the new iPad mini tablet, saying consumers will be willing to pay for quality not found in less expensive devices from rivals like Google and Amazon.

With competition growing from tablets that are smaller and less expensive than Apple’s wildly popular iPads, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and Schiller on Tuesday took the wraps off the new 7.9-inch tablet, which essentially has most of the functions and features of the full-size iPad but in a smaller package.

SAN JOSE (Reuters) – Apple Inc is expected to make its biggest product move on Tuesday since debuting the iPad two years ago, launching a smaller, cheaper tablet into a market staked out by Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc.

Apple hopes to beat back their charge onto its home turf of consumer electronics hardware, while safeguarding its lead in the larger 10-inch tablet space that even deep-pocketed rivals like Samsung Electronics have found tough to penetrate.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Texas Instruments Inc’s quarterly revenue fell as demand for its chips slipped on economic concerns, and the company forecast more weakness this quarter in all its customer segments.

The U.S. chipmaker, which supplies companies ranging from computer makers to automakers, said its customers are ordering fewer chips than expected for this time of the year as they are nervous about weak end-market demand.