Qualcomm announced at an event held earlier today in Beijing that the big daddy Snapdragon 800 will see production toward the end of May. The Snapdragon 800 features some key performance updates over to Snapdragon 600 (found in the S4, HTC One, Optimus G Pro etc) including Krait 400 architecture and Ardreno 330 graphics.

What these improvements actually mean though are the new chip is capable of being clocked at 2.3Ghz and will happily play 4K video at 30fps, although it remains to be seen just how useful this will be on a phone size display. It is rumoured that China’s ZTE will be the first company to launch a Snapdragon 800 phone, but we’ll have to wait until later this year for confirmation and further details.

[ Source ]

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Early last year LG had announced it would license ARM’s processor designs in order to bring its own chips to the market. Now Korea Times is reporting that LG will unveil its first in-house chip at CES 2013.

CEO Koo Bon-joon wants the company to own as much of its technology as it can.  The chip called H13 is built on TSMC’s 28-nanometer process and will be used for embedded devices.  They will reportedly start with a CPU for their web capable Smart TVs.

The Times is also reporting that they are working on a mobile version for use in their phones, which they are also hoping to sell to its competitors, similarly to how Samsung built chips for competitors like Apple until the relationship fizzled.

With all these manufacturers looking to get into the processor business it doesn’t seem to leave much meat on the bone for companies like ARM and Broadcom.

How do you feel about LG getting into the processor game, good move or not?

[ source ]

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And that’s why companies like IBM are really exploring silicone alternatives. One very promising direction is with carbon nanotubes and IBM has just reached a major milestone. They have created a new computer chip based on carbon nanotube technology that has more than 10,000 transistors. This is a far cry from the current generation of silicone-based microprocessors, but it does demonstrate a lot of potential for carbon nanotubes moving forward.

As you might remember, carbon nanotubes are constructed with sheets of cabon that are just a single atom thick, rolling them into a cylinder. These conduct electricity better than silicon and have the perfect shape to act as transistors. Unfortunately, they have to be completely free of inpurities and they have to be aligned perfectly. They’re harder to work with, but they could hold the future of computing because carbon nanotubes can also scale much smaller than silicone.

It’s unlikely that we’ll have a Nexus 2013 next year based on carbon nanotube technology, but with the continuing research and innovation at places like IBM, the future of Moore’s Law might still be viable.

[Source]

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CES is just around the corner and as expected, we are seeing a flood of announcements and teasers about what’s going to be showcased at the event. Sony Ericsson’s pre-CES teaser campaign started earlier with their messages on their Facebook and Google pages. Now the company has released yet another teaser, a few close-ups of an HD-capable smartphone.

“Just a few more days until we can reveal some interesting news” says Sony Ericsson, but no hints regarding the identity of the device or what’s under the hood.

As you can see in the above image, the mysterious device has a dedicated shutter button, an HD-capable camera, a micro-USB port and the onscreen toggle to switch between photos and videos with a simple touch.

The images suggest that the new device is similar in outward appearance to the XPERIA Arc S handset. The Arc S has the same curved camera key, HD labeling and squared-off microUSB port.

We are most probably looking at the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc HD, previously also known by the name Xperia Nozomi.

The camera-related hints suggest that the new device might be coming equipped with something special for all the shutterbugs out there. We are expecting a 12 to 13 MP camera with an Exmor R CMOS sensor.

And if it is capable of recording 1080p HD video, you can surely expect high-end specs. Rumors point towards a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM along with a 4.3-inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720. Hopefully the device will be powered by ICS.

Whatever is coming, we definitely won’t have to wait too long to learn everything about it. Stay tuned to this space for updates.

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It feels like only yesterday that we were all drooling over the performance capabilities of NVIDIA Tegra 2 and how its dual-coreness blows single-cores out of the water. Well, get ready to be blown away again, this time by NVIDIA’s Project Kal-El. Superman fans probably get the reference.

Realistically thought of as the Tegra 2 successor, Kal-El will be the world’s first mobile quad-core CPU. NVIDIA is already sending out samples and they expect Android devices will start getting released with Kal-El under the hood this August. That’s crazy acceleration, don’t you think? Remember that both Qualcomm and TI OMAP5 aren’t going to show up on devices until 2012.

With Project Kal-El, we can expect five times the performance of Tegra 2, support for “extreme HD” (2560×1600), and silky smooth 60fps gaming on the go (compared to just 20fps on Tegra 2). In a CoreMark benchmark, Kal-El actually outperformed a true Intel Core2Duo T7200 processor by a score of 11,354 vs. 10,136.

But wait. There’s more. NVIDIA revealed its roadmap for the next few years, following up Kal-El by Wayne in 2012, Logan in 2013, and Stark in 2014. Project Stark is expected to deliver 100x the performance of Tegra 2 and that’s just three years from now. It’s a good time for mobile enthusiasts and it’ll be really interesting to see how Qualcomm and TI respond to NVIDIA’s bold moves.

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In the on-going quest to do more with less, Freescale Semiconductor continues to deliver what we need to power our mobiles, tablets, and other infotainment appliances. The Austin-based manufacturers have announced the launch of their i.MX 6 series of quad-, dual- and single-core applications processors for 2011.

With up to four ARM Cortex A9 cores chugging at 1.2GHz each, they’re packing more than five times the power of their current generation of processors. And hitting the right notes on power consumption, Freescale reports the i.MX 6 series can deliver 24 hours of HD video playback and 30-plus days of device standby time.

Freescale is strategically targeting the fastest growing segments of the consumer market with this launch as they pair their super-powered processors with eReaders, tablets, smartphones and the increasingly common automotive infotainment systems.

“Our i.MX 6 series offers consumers the novel and uncompromised online experiences they demand from next-generation connected consumer electronic products,” said Bernd Lienhard, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Multimedia Applications Division. “Low power, cost efficiency, enormous processing headroom and unmatched compatibility are at the heart of the i.MX 6 series.”

Last but not least, the line interconnects with MDNI 1.4, GbEthernet and USB 2.0 but for some reason no USB 3.0. That said, with an open-ended “later this year” time frame there’s always room for future improvements in this and coming generations.

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Our computers in their simplest form are just a series of tiny electronic circuits containing transistors that switch on and off in certain patterns to execute the functions that we need. At their conception computers were created using only one core processor; this is what reads and performs instructions. Now a computer that has at least two processors is commonplace, and with higher end systems having up to 16 cores.

But Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have had a technological breakthrough and successfully developed a processor with more than 1000 cores on a single chip.

They achieved this feat by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which contains transistors just like all other microchips, but they are unique in that rather than having their functions set at the assembly line, the circuits are essentially a blank slate and can be customized by the user. Dr. Vanderbauwhede was able to separate the transistors into small groups and assign them each to perform a different task. This effectively created 1000 small circuits in the chip, and as a result a 1000-core processor with each individual core capable of working solely on its own instructions was born.

Dr. Vanderbauwhede said: “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option.”

They then tested the chip by processing an algorithm that is central to MPEG videos, like those used on YouTube; they came up with a speed of 5 GB/s, which is 20 times faster than current high-end desktops.

Nowadays it is expected that a computer should have a multi-core processor, they all still have to share access to only one memory source, consistently slowing down the computer. Dr. Vanderbauwhede and his team increased efficiency by giving each core is own separate amount memory.

He is planning to present his developments at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfiguable Computing in March.

[UKPA via Daily Mail]

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Intel, the worldwide hardware giant, has added yet another feather to its hat. Now it can brag about the fact that its processors power the world’s fastest super computer. As per the recent announcement by Intel, its Xeon 5600 series processors are the heart and soul of the planet’s most powerful machine, the Tianhe-1A, which is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.

The Tianhe-1A, containing 14,396 Intel processors coupled with accelerators, has so far recorded a monumental performance of 2.57 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second). Impressive, isn’t it?

For those wanting to know the finer print, Intel has partnered with Inspur, a Chinese computer manufacturer, in order to work for the National Supercomputing Center. And to further add to the glory, the most recent catalogue of Top 500 supercomputers shows that 80% of them run on Intel processors. Intel-powered machines feature in fields as diverse as scientific research, financial calculations and geophysics. Way to go, Intel!

Source: Digitimes

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Blaze Tablet Mobile Development Platform

Get ready for another monumental leap in mobile performance. Texas Instruments has formally announced that it will be working on a new line of chips known as the “Eagle” line that will make use of the next-generation of ARM Cortex-A processors. This makes TI the first partner and licensee of these processors. TI is no stranger to ARM architecture. The current TI OMAP 3 platform is based on the ARM Cortex-A8 core and it can be found in such products as the Motorola Droid (OMAP 3430,550MHz) and the Motorola Droid X (OMAP 3640, 1GHz).

The OMAP 4 platform makes use of the dual-core Cortex-A9, but we haven’t seen any products make use of this platform aside from development samples and prototypes. Even so, this is said to offer a 150% improvement in performance over OMAP 3.

The new “Eagle” chips will effectively be a part of the OMAP 5 family, so to speak, and we likely won’t see any smartphones and tablets with this architecture until 2012.

Texas Instruments Embraces Next-Gen Mobile Processor [Wired]

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