Displaying items by tag: SoC

The press, in general, has an exceptionally short memory and at times many technical reporters cannot put two and two together to save their lives. This appears to be the case with some of the reports on AMD’s “new” plans to enter the Android market at full speed. The problem with these reports is that they keep forgetting time-lines, history and only seem able to report what is handed to them in a briefing or press release. Some of them seem to think that AMD was struggling to get back into game consoles and that AMD’s interest in Android is something new; neither of these are true.

ARM has introduced a new processor architecture and accompanying GPU, designed for mobile devices from mid-priced range. They presented CPU ARM Cortex-A12, Mali-T622 GPU and video processor Mali-V500.

AMD kicked an interesting product out the door today in the form of their Operton X-Series APU SoC. You might remember that the possibility of this APU was leaked a while ago by an inadvertent inclusion on a slide showing the Operton X logo. Everyone knew this was going to fold over into an x86 APU based SoC and the launch was just a matter of time. Now the lid is off and we can talk about the Opteron X (Kyoto) and where AMD sees this new product in their server business and in the market as a whole.

For its first fiscal quarter, which ended on April 28 for the company,Nvidia reported a better-than-expected operating results. The total revenues of the company ere $954.7 million, a decline of 14% compared to the previous quarter, but an increase of 3.2% compared to $924.9 million company had achieved in the same period a year earlier.

A couple of days ago the internet lit up with AMD’s announcement of their new Jaguar SoCs. These new G-series embedded processors were boasting some rather healthy improvements in performance including a claim of a 113% increase in performance over older x86 SoCs and a rather bold claim of a 125% increase in performance over Intel’s Atom. But while the new embedded APU with its 8000 series GPU should have been big news all on its own, what really caught people’s attention was a little x in the corner. As it turns out this X is intended to denote an x86 version of the G-Series SoC…

The rise of the ARM architecture has been a meteoric one and came as something of a shock to many of the mainstream players in the mobile industry. The concept for the ARM based SoC (System on Chip) is pretty simple: build a small, energy efficient device that is able to use memory and processor cycles as efficiently as possible.  This is what x86 CPU manufacturers are trying to do as well.  So why are there more manufacturers of ARM based SoCs than there are x86? Well, the problem here is one of licensing. You see, it is much easier and less expensive to license the ARM architecture than it is x86. Right now there are very few players that even have an x86 license. This limits the competition down quite a bit and also (unfortunately) slows progress. However, the fight between Intel and ARM is just heating up. And despite the small number of players in the x86 market, things are far from certain in this area as we enter into a new round of combat between RISC and CISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing and Complete Instruction Set Computing).

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.

AMD had their big CES-2013 press conference yesterday and while the tone was the typical joyous “we are doing great” one that you hear in any press conference from a tech company these days there was something else behind the happy faces and smiles. As we watched and listened to the different speakers we heard this subtle tone and it was an apology. AMD’s message for 2013 is that they will not only promise better performance and competing products, but they will execute and deliver on those products.

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.

nVidia will officially present the next generation of Tegra SoC  for mobile devices at the upcoming CES in January next year. It is a Tegra 4 chip codenamed Wayne and SoC solutions codenamed Grey with integrated 3G and LTE modems intended for cheaper mobile devices in the middle market segment. The latter will have ARM Cortex-A9 cores in the 4+1 configuration similar to Tegra 3.