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AMD has revealed its new “Seattle” chips, processors headed to power-dense servers, and using for the first time ARM architecture as commonly found in smartphones and tablets, rather than x86. AMD Seattle, which is expected to show up in systems from the second half of 2014, will initially offer eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores running at

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This Doctor Who cast is great. No, not the cast of the show. The cast you see here. I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen something like this before, since the Doctor runs around so much. You would think he would have broken some body part long ago.

It probably has some kind of magical timey-wimey healing properties that regenerate its wearer’s bones. This cast was made for Laura Keeney while her arm was healing. To help cheer her up, her friend Zak Kinsella painted her cast in the geekiest way possible.

I guess it was either this or make it look like a Cyberman arm, which would have been equally as cool to look at.

[via Fashionably Geek]

Chalk up a win or two for Intel, with Computex 2013 Day Zero opening to a number of products with Atom chips where usually we’d expect to see ARM silicon. As expected, Intel’s processors found their way into at least one tablet from Samsung, the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1-inch, but the Atom push also got the CPU into a number of ASUS models too. Question is, has Intel managed to squeeze into the Android tablet market too late?

ASUS’ Transformer Book Trio – which is designed to run both Windows 8 and Android on a hybrid slate that can be docked in ultrabook and desktop hubs – paired an Intel mobile chip with a gruntier Core i7, while the MeMo Pad FHD 10 also spurned ARM for Atom.

Chatter of Clover Trail+ spreading had been bubbling for some weeks, but broke in earnest last Friday when multiple sources claimed Samsung was the big-name push behind broadening its chip suppliers. Intel has long been attempt to coerce manufacturers to consider its processors – even going to far as to take the lead on porting Android to x86 – but uncompetitive power consumption, among other things, kept it pretty much out of the game.

That’s all changing with the new Atom architecture, it seems. “In order to meet the demand from our vendor/carrier partners and provide a consistent high-quality experience for customers,” Samsung told us today, “Samsung has sourced components, including chipsets, from trusted partners.” The company confirmed that one such “trusted partner” and component was the processor at the heart of the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1-inch.

“Neither Samsung nor ASUS has leapt to Atom wholeheartedly”

Still, it’s worth noting that neither Samsung nor ASUS has leapt to Cover Trail+ wholeheartedly. The Intel-powered machines share press release space with ARM-based tablets; Samsung’s spec sheet, in fact, doesn’t even mention the underlying architecture or chip supplier, only the speed and the number of cores.

It’s a sign, quite possibly, that the tablet processor market is catching up to where the PC processor market reached a few years back. Most modern chips are “good enough” and so the branding advantage of calling out whether your slate runs on Qualcomm silicon, or NVIDIA silicon, or Intel silicon, simply isn’t so pressing as it perhaps once was.

Meanwhile, the days of premium Android tablets are seemingly behind us, for the most part at least. Apple’s iPad mini and Google’s Nexus 7 forced even more drastic cost-cutting so that Acer, ASUS, MSI, Samsung, and others could continue to compete; the MeMo Pad HD 7 (which runs an ARM chip, not an Intel one) for instance comes in at just $129 brand new. It’s questionable whether the slate segment is the same high-appeal category for Intel now that its margins have been eroded away.

Intel scores in tablet chips but success may come too late is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Few trend-spotters would disagree with the following prediction from ARM, but it’s worth laying it out anyway: Of the 300 million mobile devices sold in 2010, the majority cost over $400. Within the next two years, however, these “crazy money” products (as a spokesperson described them) may represent just 25 percent of the total mobile market — still huge in absolute terms, since almost two billion phones and tablets are forecast to be sold in 2015, but a distinct minority relative to entry-level and mid-range options.

In an effort to convert these expectations into an even taller heap of gold, ARM has just announced a new mid-range core, the Cortex-A12, which is designed to replace the aging Cortex-A9 while offering a 40 percent boost in performance. This gain will likely come with the added advantage of better battery life, since the Cortex-A12 will initially be fabricated at 28nm instead of 40nm, and will be offered to manufacturers alongside a new Mali GPU (the Mali-T622) and video engine (Mali-V500) that promise further power savings of their own. The Cortex-A12 will also support big.LITTLE configurations, allowing it to be installed alongside Cortex-A7 cores that will take over for low-effort tasks in order make further power savings. Big.LITTLE hasn’t really blown us away so far, at least not on the Octa-core Galaxy S 4, but its wrinkles may well have been ironed out by mid 2014, which is when the Cortex-A12 is due to land. Check out the PR for more technical details on each component.

Richard Lai contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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Samsung‘s upcoming Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 will use an Atom processor rather than an ARM-based chip, multiple sources claim, marking a high-profile win for Intel and a perhaps surprising move for Samsung, which makes its own Exynos ARM silicon. The new 10.1-inch Android tablet will use a Clover Trail+ processor in at least one of its variants, both Reuters and Korea Times report, with insiders at Samsung and Intel supposedly confirming rumors about the architecture switch that had been circulating for the past weeks.

Although Samsung has already scheduled a standalone event in the UK on June 20, at which the company has promised the reveal of new Galaxy and ATIV hardware, the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 apparently won’t wait that long to break cover. In fact, Samsung is tipped to be unveiling it at Computex, which kicks off on June 4.

Other specifications for the tablet are unclear, though it’s likely to use an LCD display rather than Samsung’s AMOLED panels, based on previous models of the same size.

Initially, speculation that Samsung would look to Intel’s chips was met with some degree of skepticism, not least because Samsung has its own chip production facility. The company’s Exynos processors have already been used in numerous Samsung products, leading to questions as to why the brand might dilute its “home supplier” advantage.

According to the Korea Times, however, the deal with Intel is part of Samsung’s strategy to hedge its bets on chip supply. “Samsung wants to secure as many processors as possible at better pricing” an unnamed member of Samsung’s research team told the Korean source. “That’s why Samsung Electronics has recently been diversifying its procurement channel in processor chips as a strategy to stabilize production yields of its in-house Exynos-branded processors.”

Intel, for its part, has apparently been more than willing to accommodate Samsung casting a broader net for its processor supplies. The x86 company has supposedly offered highly competitive prices for the Atom CPUs, and has reportedly increased its Atom chip specialists based at Intel Korea eightfold, to more than 50, in the space of a year.

“Most of them are working for Samsung-related projects with a mission to customize circuits for adaptation on Samsung products” an unnamed Intel source suggested.

Intel has had some quiet successes with its Android-on-x86 push, including the Motorola RAZR i launched last year, which impressed with its performance even if sales didn’t quite compete with other high-profile handsets. The company has previously confirmed its goal to take a bigger bite of the mobility pie, aiming to undermine ARM’s success in the smartphone and tablet industry, though difficulties achieving the same degree of power efficiency and performance have undermined Atom chips.

VIA: Engadget; Android Beat

Galaxy Tab 3 packs Atom not ARM tip sources as Intel ramps mobile push is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.