Displaying items by tag: SoC

Apple and Samsung were the world's largest buyers of chips last year among device manufacturers with total revenues exceeding one billion dollars according to data collected by the company IHS. Apple took the first spot with a total consumption of the chips in the amount of 30.3 billion dollars, while Samsung took second place with $20.2 billion spent on chips.

Intel started their Intel Developers Forum (IDF), held from 10-12.9. in San Francisco, in a very interesting conference where the CEO Brian Krzanich showed interesting new products.One of them is 14nm Broadwell Intel SoC, which Krzanich demonstrated as a part of an unknown reference notebook on which he did not present any details.

Chinese Xiaomi unveiled Android smartphone Mi3, the first such device powered by Nvidia's Tegra 4 chipset. Smartphone with other specifications also enters the upper segment of the market, and will be available in one more version with a processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 800.

Intel’s Atom CPU is getting a little bit of a boost in order to give it an edge in the microserver market. The new CPU is the C2000 which is something of a departure from their older Atom designs. Unlike the Atom we all know about (two cores, limited compute and memory support) the new C2000 is much beefier with 8 cores and support for 64 GB of memory. The move is something of a departure for the Atom line as some at Intel have claimed that adding more cores to a CPU is only needed if your CPU is not powerful or efficient enough.

After nVidia launched their own gaming product (SHIELD) rumors that nVidia will be making their own branded tablet started popping up. Most of these were centered on some very interesting improvements in the graphical power of their SoCs. For more than a few years the industry wondered why nVidia was not the hands down leader in the tablet graphics market. There was no direct competition from AMD and most of the other companies in the game did not have the same level of experience that nVidia had. Somehow their products, though good, were not the game leaders that nVidia and others felt they should be. Of course all of that is changing as nVidia showed us with Project Logon.

The MediaTek company has recently surpassed the competition with the introduction of the first true SoC with eight cores. In order to improve their market position, they  did not stop at just that, but they presented another product, its first SoC based on ARM big.LITTLE technology. It is a heterogeneous architecture, which combines energy-efficient less powerful processors with the stronger ones that consume more power.

Graphics processing that only a couple of months ago required a powerhouse desktop, is now being demonstrated on a Logan equipped mobile device. The “Ira” demo below shows this.

New version of Exynos 5 Octa SoC with mark 5420, based on six-core Mali-T628 M6 chip and contains four ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.8 GHz, and four 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7s in ARM big.LITTLE configuration. Samsung claims that the new SoC delivers improved optimization of the energy consumption by 20% compared to the previous generation, and can provide twice as better graphics.

According to the first unofficial measurement of performance of the new Intel's "system on a chip" for mobile devices, which is being developed under the codename Bay Trail, it should be faster than any currently available commercial solution.

nVidia is best known as the maker of heavy duty GPUs although most know about their mobile product Tegra (and the components that go into it). Between these two items nVidia has a very good product portfolio. However, nVidia has not always been limited to GPUs and SoCs. At one time they also developed and manufactured their own Chipsets. These were required to utilize SLI (Scalable Link Interface) that has its roots from 3dfx which nVidia grabbed when they bought the latter. nVidia’s chipset business did not last that long due to a number of reasons and they were eventually forced to let it drop and instead license the right to use SLI out to other companies.