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New Dual Core Samsung Mobile Chip Named Exynos – Arrives March

Michael Kwan — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 18:46:57 +0000

It’s not enough anymore to have “just” a gigahertz processor in your smartphone. We want two cores. We want faster speeds. And Samsung is trying to deliver with its upcoming Exynos chip.

Set to hit production next month, the Exynos dual-core processor might have been beaten to the punch by the NVIDIA Tegra2 and it might get lost in the shadows behind a Snapdragon alternative. That said, Samsung has demonstrated its prowess in this realm with Hummingbird already.

But why Exynos? Apparently, it’s a portmanteau of exypnos and prasinos, Greek words meaning “smart” and “green,” respectively. The assumption, then, is that they’re working on lower power consumption and all that jazz too.

Exynos associates Samsung’s “smart and green” strategy adopted by its semiconductor devices and solutions developed specifically to support the stringent performance and power requirements of mobile devices. Smart refers to high-performance aspect and Green represents low power features of Samsung’s application processors. Exynos originates from the Greek words smart (exypnos) and green (prasinos).

The Exynos 4210 (once known as the Orion) will be the first chip in the line. Now we just have to wait for a quad core chip announcement to rival the TI OMAP5 line.

Samsung Assigns New Nomenclature to Application Processor Family

SEOUL, Korea–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced a new brand name for its application processor family. Exynos will be applied to Samsung’s application processors, which are designed to power mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

“Application processors for the mobile market are one of the flagship products in our semiconductor business”
“Application processors for the mobile market are one of the flagship products in our semiconductor business,” said Seh-Woong Jeong, executive vice president of marketing, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to introduce the brand name of Exynos for Samsung’s application processor family. As consumers demand more from their mobile products, Samsung’s Exynos chips will be the power inside enabling the coolest HD multi-media features with even longer battery life.”

Exynos associates Samsung’s “smart and green” strategy adopted by its semiconductor devices and solutions developed specifically to support the stringent performance and power requirements of mobile devices. Smart refers to high-performance aspect and Green represents low power features of Samsung’s application processors. Exynos originates from the Greek words smart (exypnos) and green (prasinos).

The new naming system will be first applied to the dual core processor codenamed Orion, which was announced in September 2010. Carrying the name Exynos 4210, Samsung’s powerful 1GHz dual-core application processor is scheduled for production next month.

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2009 consolidated sales of US$116.8 billion. Employing approximately 174,000 people in 193 offices across 66 countries, the company consists of eight independently operated business units: Visual Display, Mobile Communications, Telecommunication Systems, Digital Appliances, IT Solutions, Digital Imaging, Semiconductor and LCD. Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs. For more information, please visit www.samsung.com.

[Giz via Samsung

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Sneak peek at Intel Medfield smartphone platform

Michael Kwan — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:29:12 +0000

Smartphones are big business. From Tegra2 to Snapdragon, the chips for these devices are also big business. And it looks like Intel is finally ready to make a huge splash in this segment with the Intel Medfield platform.

The announcement isn’t new — Intel said it was going to do this — but now we’re getting our first real look at a phone powered by Medfield. Sort of. What you see here is a shot of Anand Chandrasekher holding a Medfield-powered phone. He’s the VP and GM of the Intel Ultra Mobility Group.

So, what do we know about this handset? Not much, unfortunately. The Medfield processor is supposed to rival the ARM chipsets, providing plenty of horsepower with minimal power consumption. The expectation is that Intel will, at the very least, be working with Nokia on something. The Nokia N9, for example, could get a 1.2GHz Medfield to go along with its MWC debut, dropping the physical keyboard in the process. There’s also word of a MeeGo tablet with Medfield.

Will Intel work with the Android crew too? How about its old buddies at Microsoft for Windows Phone 7? From Hummingbird to A4 (and soon A5), there certainly is no shortage of mobile processor options these days.

[Maemo via Twitter]

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Marvell’s 1.5GHz tri-core processor for tablets and smartphones

Michael Kwan — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:40:07 +0000

Marvell appears to have made the first tri-core mobile processor. These tri-core system-on-a-chip solutions will be clocked at an astounding 1.5GHz. We’re hearing about dual-core chips from Qualcomm that do that now, but not tri-core. Marvell says these chips are designed for “ultra-low power, long battery life smartphones and tablets.”

Really? Adding in another core and bumping the clock speed can save battery life? The new ARMADA 628 SoC will use the third core clocked at 624MHz for less resource demanding applications, something like playing mp3s in the background, or push notification updates. Just to alleviate the faster clocking cores from managing menial tasks. Expect 3D 1080p graphics, video encoding and decoding, and get this: project images on multiple simultaneous displays at 2K x 2K resolution, sounds like a Kno no?

[Marvell]

Marvell Raises Technology Bar Again with World’s First 1.5 GHz Tri-Core Processor Delivering Dual Stream 1080p 3D Video for Smartphones and Tablets

Irvine and Santa Clara, Calif. (Sep 23, 2010) Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL), a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today introduced the world’s first 1.5 GHz tri-core application processor, the Marvell® ARMADA™ 628. This product incorporates a full System-on-a-Chip design (SoC) with three high performance Marvell-designed, ARM-compliant CPU cores operating as the world’s first commercially available heterogeneous, multi-core, applications processor.

“Marvell has once again set the benchmark for the rest of the industry with the world’s first 1.5 GHz tri-core processor, delivering dual stream 1080p 3D video and 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second delivered on ultra-low-power, long battery life smartphones and tablets,” said Weili Dai, Marvell Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “This is important because today’s consumers expect robust enterprise and consumer applications delivered to the palm of their hands. Marvell is uniquely equipped to lead this mobile revolution as the semiconductor industry’s one-stop shop solution provider. This is an example of Marvell’s unique ability to take a diverse cutting edge technology portfolio and integrate into differentiated solutions to give our customers game-changing advantage.”

The new ARMADA 628 tri-core processor incorporates a number of advanced processing and power management features. The tri-core design integrates two high performance symmetric multiprocessing cores and a third core optimized for ultra low-power. The third core is designed to support routine user tasks and acts as a system management processor to monitor and dynamically scale power and performance. The tri-core architecture provides superior performance and lower power over dual-core designs while maintaining industry compatibility and leadership — ensuring a richer, faster and smoother experience than any other ARM-based processor available today.

“Marvell’s groundbreaking tri-core architecture is a unique solution to a long-time problem—how to achieve PC-class performance without breaking the limited power budget of smartphones, tablets and other mobile consumer devices,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group. “With Marvell’s ARMADA 628, consumers can anticipate better visual, dynamic experiences on an array of new mobile devices.”

The architecture is analogous to a hybrid muscle car. The ARMADA 628 is intended to perform like a race car engine on demand, while still delivering the frugal gas-mileage of a hybrid automobile. In real world terms, this enables the ARMADA 628 to play more than 10 hours of full 1080p HD video or 140 hours of music on a single charge while still providing 3 GHz of raw computational horsepower.

Marvell’s ARMADA 628 tri-core CPU comprises a complete SoC design – a first for the industry. In addition to the tri-core CPU, there are six additional processing engines to support stunning 3D graphics, 1080p video encode/decode, ultra high fidelity audio, advanced cryptography, and digital photo data processing – for a total of nine dedicated core functions.

The ARMADA 628 is also designed to be the first mobile CPU to provide high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity, which offers 10x faster performance than USB 2.0.

About ARMADA 628
The ARMADA 628 is based on a Marvell-designed ARM v7 MP compatible CPU offering 1.5 GHz performance. It offers support to use LP-DDR2 or DDR3 memory up to 533 MHz, a highly flexible display controller capable of driving four simultaneous displays at up t o 2K x 2K resolution, and a highly robust security subsystem that includes a secure execution processor. An integrated 3D engine renders 200 million triangles per second for an immersive game play experience and a multi-format video engine supports dual stream 1080p video for a true 3D visual experience. In addition, the ARMADA 628 supports DirectX, Open GL ES 2.0, and Open VG 1.1 – ensuring complete compatibility with the most hotly anticipated mobile game titles. ARMADA 628 supports RIM OS, Android™, Linux, Windows Mobile, and full Adobe Flash.

Marvell has a long history of delivering multi-core technology to customers for use in a broad variety of applications ranging from home networking, gateways, all the way up to computing-intensive enterprise applications. Most recently, Marvell announced the first implementation of quad-core technology for the ARM ecosystem, further demonstrating Marvell’s ability to deliver high performance, flexible technology that meets the silicon requirements of numerous tier-one customers, regardless of the end application.

Key Features
World’s first “tri-core” application processor
Up to 1.5 GHz for the two main cores and 624 MHz for the third low power core
“Heterogeneous multiprocessing” with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
1 MB System Level 2 Cache
Platform leading multimedia capabilities, including support for both WMMX2 and NEON acceleration; and a highly optimized pipelined VFPv3 floating point engine
Member of the ARMADA family of processors for easy software porting
1080p dual stream 3D video applications (30 FPS, multi-format)
Ultimate 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second (MT/s)
High performance, integrated image signal processor (ISP)
Ability to project images on multiple simultaneous displays
2 LCDs
1 HDMI
1 advanced EPD controller
Peripherals support: USB 3.0 Superspeed Client, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, HDMI with integrated PHY, UniPro, Slimbus, SPMI

Availability
The ARMADA 628 is currently available for sampling to customers. For more information please go to www.marvell.com.

About Marvell
Marvell is a world leader in the development of storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions. Marvell’s diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless, and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure including enterprise, metro, home, and storage networking. As used in this release, the term “Marvell” refers to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries. For more information, visit http://www.marvell.com.

Marvell and the M logo are registered trademarks of Marvell and/or its affiliates. ARMADA is a trademark of Marvell and/or its affiliates. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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