Displaying items by tag: ARM

ARM has released three new multi-core GPUs that are extremely flexible which ARM hopes will find their way into a wide range of mobile devices next year. New GPUs are the Mali T624, T628 and T678, built on the ARM Midgard graphic architecture. The new Mali GPUs are supposed to be the successors to the Mali 450-MP found in Samsung Galaxy S III, and if we can trust ARM they surpass that generation quite a bit. ARM claims they will offer a performance increase of aproximately 50% over the earlier Midgard generation T604 and T658. The new Mali GPU bring support for a graphics compression codec called ASTC (Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression), which  optimizes GPU performance and increases battery life.

At their earnings call the other Day Intel made the statement that they are at least three years ahead of other companies when it comes to silicon manufacturing. Yesterday and today the news is all about how ARM is preparing to compete with Intel in the server market with their 64-bit RISC processors which are to be manufactured using the same tri-gate manufacturing that Intel is currently using for their Ivy Bridge CPUs. You know the ones that have been shipping since early this year? This means that no matter how thin you slice it ARM will not have able to make a tri-gate CPU until at least 2014-2015.

Marketing is a fickle thing and one that can come back to bite a company when they are least expecting it. What has happened is that the marketing people working now are forgetting that the market has a much longer memory than they used to and, of course, the Internet never forgets.  This is what Microsoft is facing right now as they try to compete with Apple in slim and ultrabooks (as well as regular notebooks and other products).  For years they have portrayed Apple as flashy and overpriced using materials that increase the manufacturing costs without any real benefit to the consumer. Now, however Microsoft is finding itself being bitten by those same marketing campaigns as they work to raise consumer and enterprise interest in Windows 8 (all flavors).

Microsoft is looking to get a jump on Windows 8 sales and as such has announced the general availability date. Unlike past releases Microsoft is going to pull the wraps off of Windows 8 (including Windows RT) in October instead of November. We are thinking that they will still probably favor the end of October instead of the beginning simply to make sure they are in the stores for the Holliday rush. This would seem to be a smart move on Microsoft’s part especially as Apple should be launching the next version of the iPhone sometime around then if the rumors are true.

On Saturday we published an editorial about some of the issues with Windows RT. These issues served to highlight why Microsoft might have chosen to build their own tablet. Although we do not agree with the decision and think that it will hurt Microsoft in the long run (with Windows RT) we cans still see how it all unfolded. As you might imagine not everyone saw things the way that we did, but what surprised me was a comment that seemed to indication that the development community was going to HAVE to write for Windows RT.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 (both Windows RT and Windows 8 for x86-64) is due to hit the market around November of this year and it has already caused a ton of controversy. But there is one that did not get a ton of press when it was announced that highlights a few issues with Windows that many are not anticipating. Around the first of July it was announced that HP would not be making an ARM based tablet for the next OS and we also know that Acer will probably not as well.

Google (and ARM as a whole) is finding out the hard way that building an OS is not that easy and without proper and full support you are going to have problems across your entire platform. Today and Google I/O 12 Google announced and showed off Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Now this sounds great but there are still a ton of devices that are waiting for ICS (Android 4.0) that was announced last year.

Well the world is abuzz with the news that *gasp* the Microsoft Surface tablet only comes with WiFi. For some reason this appears to be a big deal to many news sites that also have articles that list reasons why you should wait for the iPhone 5 and a few others. What I find interesting is that very few appear to remember that both Windows 8 and Windows RT will have the ability to utilize peripherals attached Via the included USB port.

When Microsoft announced the new Surface tablet we saw a lot of analysts comment on its form, features and more. What we did not hear a lot about until hours (and in some cases about a day) later was the impact that this would have on Microsoft’s partners. It was one of the first things that we thought about when it rolled out. Did Microsoft lets any of its partners know and what are they feeling right now.

There used to be a thing called truth in journalism. It meant that when you published an article you should at the very least check your facts if you are presenting it as “news” in the world of editorial articles things are different as an editorial is nearly always an opinion based article with some facts thrown in for furn. What has happened though is that with the introduction of Blogs, Fan Sites and other venues for information some of the fact checking has gone out the window in the effort to be the first to report on a juicy bit of news. When an article hits one of the big sites it often gets spread around the net and becomes the “truth” simply by means of repetition. We have watched this many times (and it is something that Apple’s PR and marketing thrive on).