Hasta La Gadget!

Ah, leaked company presentation slides, they have a clarity only Mr. Blurrycam would despise. EETimes got a batch of them from Samsung dated November 2009 making the rounds, but more important than revealing its equal love for both Roman and Greek mythology, we get a glimpse at its then-planned ARM chip roadmap (yeah, another one) through 2013. In a nutshell, for the Cortex A9 crowd we’ve got the 800MHz dual core “Orion” due for mass production in Q1 2011, a 1GHz single core “Pegasus” for Q4 2011, a 1GHz dual core “Hercules” for Q1 2012, and for sometime in 2012 / 2013, a 1.2GHz dual core “Draco” and quad core “Aquila.” Fear not, Cortex A5 fanatics, you’ve got gifts as well, in the form of 600MHz single core “Mercury” and dual core “Venus” chips, slated for 2010 / 2011 and 2012 / 2013, respectively. We don’t expect the nomenclature to extend beyond internal usage, but frankly, who cares — it’s the devices that count, and unfortunately all we can do is doodle our future gadget hopes and dreams onto scraps of paper while we wait.

Samsung’s ARM roadmap lays coordinates through 2013: Aquila, Venus, and Draco (oh my) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple is rumored to be considering a bid for ARM, the British company that designs the processors found in some smartphones including the iPhone, according to The London Evening Standard.

ARM’s share prices soared to an eight-year high on Wednesday as a result of the rumor, but ARM chief executive Warren East today told The Guardian that there was no necessity for the company, whose market capitalization stands at $4.6 billion, to be acquired.

“Exciting though it is to have the share price pushed up by these rumors, common sense tells us that our standard business model is an excellent way for technology companies to gain access to our technology,” East told the Guardian. “Nobody has to buy the company.”

However, that statement does not deny the rumor, as some publications have suggested. Companies sometimes use statements provided to the press to talk tough and indirectly negotiate with potential buyers, using ambiguous statements such as East’s.

The takeover offer is rumored to be in the $8 billion range, which would be 20 percent of Apple’s $41.7 billion cash reserves, as MacRumors’ Arnold Kim points out.

The benefits of such a buyout are, however, questionable. Some suggest Apple could acquire ARM to shut out competitors wishing to use the processor, but that wouldn’t prevent them from using mobile processors from other companies. Also, Apple purchased chipmaker PA Semi in April 2008, and Steve Jobs has said the purpose of that buyout was to make system-on chips for mobile devices.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” Jobs told NY Times in June 2008.

(A teardown of the iPad, however, reveals Apple is still using an ARM-designed processor.)

Also, Apple is ARM’s biggest customer, and ARM pockets royalties for every iPhone and iPad sold, as well as other mobile devices using ARM chips. Given those facts, an ARM acquistion does seem unnecessary indeed.

City aflame with takeover talk of ARM and Xtrata [London Evening Standard]

See Also:

• Rumor: iPad’s A4 Chip Was Outsourced
• iPad Dissection Reveals Its Secret Powers
• Development of Apple’s iPad Chip Estimated at $1B

Photo of a DIY digital clock equipped with an ARM processor: htomari/Flickr

You’ll recall, wise and knowledgeable as you are, that we weren’t exactly bowled over by Sharp’s keyboard-equipped PC-Z1 portable when we got to play with it at IFA last year. Coming back for another bite at the cherry, the Japanese company has just announced the NetWalker PC-T1, which does away with the disappointing keyboard but retains the crazy pixel density (1024 x 600 resolution on a 5-inch display) and Freescale i.MX515 CPU of its predecessor. Also on offer are Bluetooth and 802.11b/g wireless options, Ubuntu 9.04 as the OS, and USB and MicroSD ports for a nice bit of expandability. An Anglo-Japanese dictionary comes pre-installed plus you’ll get access to Sharp’s e-bookstore, which has over 25,000 titles on offer. Of course, all that good stuff is tempered by a mediocre 6-hour battery life and a ¥47,000 ($510) price tag. Look for this MID archetype to hit stores in Japan next month.

Sharp’s NetWalker PC-T1 is the very definition of a MID, coming in May originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Time to add another candidate for the tablet portion of your gadget budget. The ODROID tablet — being developed by Hardkernel, the folks behind the ODROID portable console — has at its heart a 1GHz Samsung S5PC110 application processor. Also known as Hummingbird, this chip can drive 1080p video at 30fps according to Samsung, and its ability to deliver a flawlessly smooth user experience was demonstrated in our Galaxy S hands-on. It is an extremely promising core to build around, and the 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen with 1,366 x 768 resolution and Android 2.1 inclusions are nothing to sniff at either. For now, all we have is the demo video after the break — starring your favorite tech blog — but we’ll surely keep an eye out for developments with this device. Particularly if the bezel matches the thin metal frame we’re seeing right now.

Continue reading ODROID tablet sports Hummingbird application processor, shows off naked dev edition on video

ODROID tablet sports Hummingbird application processor, shows off naked dev edition on video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever so gently, we’re starting to peel away the layers of mystery surrounding the A4 system-on-chip that powers Apple’s fancy new slate device. iFixit, helped by reverse engineering firm Chipworks, have gone to the trouble of both dissecting and X-raying the iPad’s central processing hub in their quest to lift the veil of ignorance. Their findings confirmed that the A4 is built using a “package on package” method, meaning that the 256MB of Samsung-provided SDRAM is stacked immediately atop the CPU, which is noted as being reductive to both latency and energy use. With a single core processor inside, the iFixit team concluded the iPad had to be running on a Cortex A8 — which is very much the likeliest choice at this point — but their assertion that it couldn’t be a Cortex A9 MPCore inside is inaccurate, as those chips also come in single-core options. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up against Samsung’s Hummingbird chip, which was designed by Intrinsity, the same company Apple is being rumored to have recently acquired. Finally, the visual inspection of the iPad’s mobo puts a model number to the already known PowerVR GPU, narrowing it down to the SGX 535, while also naming and picturing a number of other exciting components, such as the always popular capacitive touchscreen controller. Hit the source link below for all the lurid images.

Apple’s A4 system-on-chip gets decoupled from iPad, investigated with the help of an X-ray originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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