Hasta La Gadget!

This UK chip designer is accustomed to steep growth in demand for its Cortex mobile processors, and although we’ve seen hints that it faces new challenges ahead, for now it’s mostly all gravy. Revenue in Q2 2013 soared 26 percent year-over-year to £171.2 million ($264.3 million), while profit before tax was up 30 percent £86.6 million (in “normalised” terms). Mobile devices remain the largest market for the company, but embedded devices (including wearables, Raspberry Pi and printers) is the fastest growing segment, expanding by 25 percent in the last year. The future continues to look rosy for ARM, with new Samsung Exynos 5 chipsets arriving based on ARM’s Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores in big.LITTLE configurations.

The only hint of negativity in the earnings report was a huge expense of £41.8 million incurred by a patent attack from an unnamed “third party”, which was probably MIPS (see More Coverage), and which contributed to a much lower IFRS profit of £15 million — although this represents ARM’s contribution to a “full and final settlement”, which presumably means it’s a one-off thing.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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Source: ARM

Samsung couldn’t help itself last week when it teased a new Exynos 5 Octa system on a chip, and now it’s dishing out the full details. The fresh 5420 variant of the SoC is based on Mali-T628 MP6 silicon, packs a quartet of ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.8GHz and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7s in an ARM big.LITTLE configuration. Seoul claims that the package packs 20 percent more CPU processing punch, and has two times greater 3D graphics power than its predecessor. Dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz gives the processor a screaming memory bandwidth of 14.9 GBps, which lends it full HD WiFi display support. Baked inside is an image compression solution that makes for energy efficient multimedia loading, and squeezes out more hours of use with high-res displays. There’s no word on which devices might use the new SoCs, but the chips are already being sampled by Samsung’s customers, and mass-production is slated for August.

Filed under: Mobile, Samsung

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Forget your Raspberry Pi and all of those Android dongles: this quad-core, ARM-based box claims to offer up a PC-like experience for just $100.

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Earlier this month, the AnTuTu benchmarking tool raised a bit of a firestorm when it showed Intel‘s Atom Z2580 out performing offerings from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Samsung. This led to BDTI, a consulting firm, showing that not all instructions were being executed by the Intel processor, causing a false boost in results. As such, AnTuTu has issued a revised version of the benchmarking tool, and Intel has fallen 20-percent as a result.

Reportedly, this entire issue was the result of the ICC compiler, which was introduced in version 2.9.4 and utilized for Intel processors, while other processors utilized a GCC compiler. The issue caused the RAM test to be incomplete, causing the artificially high results. The revised version is 3.2.2 and was released this past Wednesday.

The ICC compiler is still used for Intel processors in the new version, but the new benchmarks scores are vastly different, with the Atom Z2580 taking a hit of about 20-percent and the RAM score in particular falling by half. Other scores are said to have been marginally affected, but the big changes center in these two areas.

Meanwhile, the results for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and the Samsung S4 Oct were relatively unchanged, with the Exynos 5 Octa now ranking higher in performance the Intel Atom Z2580. Next month AnTuTu plans to issue new testing standards, at which point we’ll get a chance to see what kind of result changes might surface with the next big release.

AnTuTu did not reveal what changes it made to the newly released version to correct these issues, and some are questioning whether they’re now accurate. Looking at other benchmarks for the processors, however, the new AnTuTu results fall more in line with what we’ve seen elsewhere.

SOURCE: EE Times

Intel Atom Z2580 AnTuTu benchmark falls 20% following revision is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Thanks to Linus Torvalds’ figurative stroke of the pen, the Linux kernel 3.10 is now final — paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second — rather than 1,000 times — when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM support by including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types — commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 — that focus on either power savings or performance. The full list of improvements is rather lengthy, but if you feel like nerding out with the changelog, just grab a caffeinated beverage and get to it.

Filed under: Misc

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Via: Tech2.in

Source: Linus Torvalds (Linux Kernel Mailing List)