Displaying items by tag: ARM

The consumer electronic market is an interesting one. It is probably one of the only markets (with the exception of possibly the auto industry) to have the massive number of incorrect segmenting of products. One of the biggest areas of segmentation (incorrect segmentation) is in the “PC” market. Here the competition for products is insane. Back in the early days (the days when we had IBM Compatibles) things were relatively simple; at least they were on the surface. When you walked into a store and looked for a computer (if you were at all interested in having one back in the mid-90s) you saw IBM’s and their clones. One of the first computers I was exposed to was the Osborne One which actually predates the original IBM PC and the consolidation of the market in the early to mid-80s. In fact it was the introduction of the IBM PC combined with the Kaypro II portable that ended up killing Osborne and their chance in the market.

Samsung has officially unveiled the Exynos 5 Octa, the first processor for mobile devices with eight physical cores. The processor is based on last year's ARM big.LITTLE design that uses 4 weaker and more fuel-efficient cores for less demanding tasks and four cores that become active when the mobile device needs maximum performance.

It looks like Acer plans to launch a new tablet. The unit price of this new tablet should not exceed $ 100, which will align the device with the cheapest Android tablets that are out on the market. However, a low price does not mean that the device itself will be bad; on the contrary it's a pretty decent bang for buck.

Nokia is developing a tablet based on an ARM processor and Windows RT, according plans of the Finnish manufacturer. The device should be launched in early 2013, and will have a screen with a diagonal of 10.1 inches. This device should complement their Windows Phone line up and let them compete in a wider market (with companies like HTC and Samsung who will be making both devices as well).

MIPS has unveiled a new edition of its processor architecture, the "release 5" which inherits the "release 3". With the new architecture, MIPS hopes to improve their standing in the competition with ARM, and the most important features include hardware-assisted virtualization, and new SIMD instructions. There is also improved support for multi-threaded execution, and the address space for 32-bit architecture has also been upgraded.

Qualcomm intends to implement their fast Krait cores, like those in the Snapdragon S4, only to the chips for the upper segment of the market. The company will incorporate Krait core designs only inside of their quad-core SoC chips for high-end mobile devices, while the cheaper Snapdragon will be for smartphones priced below $160 and will have a reference ARM core. This has been confirmed by James Shen, one of Qualcomm's managers.

Android is becoming more and more recognized as an independent platform for gaming every day. We first read about the console Ouya, whose authors managed to raise the required  $500,000 via Kickstarter and promised to bring the console in December to stores, and today on IndieGoGo, another service for public financing, eSfere appeared.

Intel has presented a new technology for the production of mobile chips for small portable devices. These new chips should be more competitive in the market that is now dominated by chips based on ARM's designs. They presented their ultra-low power SoC designs already at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco this year. Intel's 22-nanometer technology for SoC's should be ready for mass production of these chips during the next year.

In order to satisfy the appetites of its numerous U.S. semiconductor clients, Taiwanese TSMC appears to be preparing to build a huge factory in the U.S. Earlier this month, word spread that an unnamed company hired Deloitte for business and financial advice to explore locations for the construction of huge buildings in the districts of Rensselaer, Saratoga and Utica, New York. The server location must have access to water, power and gas resources which can serve the building of 3.2 million square feet (300,000 square meters) which will employ around 1,000 workers (40% with an engineering degree). The building would be up to 55 meters high, and would cost several billion dollars.

According to reports on Bloomberg, Apple is working the possibility of a switch of all of their Mac PCs to ARM processors. If they do make this change it will be the third processor architecture they have gone through. Apple started with Motorola 68xxx series processors, to be switched to the PowerPC in 1994, and for the past seven years they have been running on the Intel x86 architecture. Most interesting of all is that Apple managed to successfully, usually with minimal shock to their customers, make such a fundamental transition every time by which they are unparalleled in the industry.