Hasta La Gadget!

At yesterday’s investor meeting in Taipei, TSMC’s chairman and CEO Morris Chang shared the good news that his company’s 28nm chip shipment this year will triple that of last year, which should boost its annual increase in revenue to above the industry’s average rate of seven percent. China Times reports that orders for TSMC’s 28nm silicon are lined up to as far out as late Q3, courtesy of demand for ARM processors, baseband chips, graphics processors and x86 processors. This is no surprise considering the likes of Qualcomm (Snapdragon 600 and 800), Huawei (HiSilicon K3V2 Pro and K3V3), NVIDIA (Tegra 4), AMD (Temash and Kabini) and possibly Apple will be ordering more 28nm-based chipsets from the foundry throughout the year. TSMC did struggle with its 28nm supply for Qualcomm early last year, but it eventually caught up later on, and Chang stated that TSMC now owns nearly 100 percent of the 28nm process market.

Looking further ahead, Chang said his company’s already seen enough clients and demand for the upcoming 20nm manufacturing process, which should have a more significant financial contribution in 2014. The exec also predicted that at TSMC, its 20nm production will see a bigger growth rate between 2014 and 2015 than its 28nm counterpart did between 2012 and 2013 — the former should eventually nab close to 90 percent of the market, said Chang.

[Image credit: TSMC]

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Via: The Next Web

Source: China Times (translated), MoneyDJ (translated)

STMicroelectronics may not be a household name, but it’s a name that’s stamped on quite a few gizmos that you and yours have probably handled. Going forward, however, the company is announcing a new “strategic plan” that’ll key in on five growth drivers while waving goodbye to a jointly held venture with ST-Ericsson. Carlo Bozotti, President and CEO of ST, stated the following: “Today we are announcing the new ST, aligned with the new market environment. Based on that, we have made the decision to exit ST-Ericsson after a transition period. We will continue to support ST-Ericsson as their supply-chain partner, advanced process-technology partner and application-processor IP provider.”

From now on, the outfit will focus on MEMS and sensors, smart power, automotive products, microcontrollers, and application processors including digital consumer — clearly, five areas where the tie-up with ST-Ericsson won’t be necessary. Most analysts suggest that the two simply couldn’t find a way to be competitive in the mobile chip business, with larger Asian and US-based rivals eating an increasing share of that pie. Moreover, the venture has been lagging ever since Nokia’s smartphone downfall; as luck would (or wouldn’t, depending on perspective) have it, Nokia was one of ST-Ericsson’s bigger clients. It remains to be seen how many jobs will be lost due to this decision, and which of the remaining chip makers will be swooping in to buy up what’s left.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: Reuters

Source: STMicroelectronics

Qualcomm Atheros has announced its new QCA1990, a low-power NFC chip that holds the title of being the smallest ultra-low system-on-a-chip currently available. This NFC chip is 50-percent the size of its competitors, and aims to solve the current criticism regarding the battery usage of NFC technology. Samples will begin going out in Q1 of 2013.

The QCA1990 is integrated with the Snapdragon S4, and, according to the press release, creates “seamless user experiences” when used with Qualcomm’s WCN3680 wifi/Bluetooth chip. Also, and perhaps one of its best offerings, the QCA1990 supports antennas that are 8 times smaller than current standards.

What does this mean for consumer technology? While NFC has been generating a nice deal of buzz amongst adopters of the latest and greatest gadgets, many devices still lack the feature due to its energy drain, with many critics saying that Bluetooth 4.0 is a better option. This new chip by Qualcomm puts the kibosh on those arguments, however, and is certainly a step in the right direction.

Qualcomm’s Vice President of Product Management David Favreau offered this statement. “Qualcomm Atheros believes NFC will be another key element of an enriched experience for smartphone and tablet consumers. As consumers continue to adopt functions like mobile payments and contactless data exchange, Qualcomm intends to be at the forefront of delivering simple, easy-to-use solutions to OEM partners.”

Qualcomm announces ultra-low power NFC QCA1990 chip is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re looking to create that perfect multi-threaded, NFC, GPS-based OpenCL app (and who isn’t?), but found your development board options too limited, Samsung has good news. It’s just launched the Arndale community development board around its Exynos 5 Dual SoC, with the ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core CPU and ARM Mali T604 GPU. Those specs give the board “an order of magnitude lift in performance” from the last model and full profile OpenCL capability, according to Samsung, on top of NFC, GPS and camera sensor features. That’ll let developers go to town on new games, security and multimedia apps next month for $250 — if that’s you, check the PR after the break or coverage below.

Continue reading Samsung launches $250 Exynos 5-based Arndale community board for app developers

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Samsung

Samsung launches $250 Exynos 5-based Arndale community board for app developers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that AMD’s fresh new FX processors based on the Piledriver architecture are out in the wild, the specialist hardware sites have seen fit to benchmark the top-lining FX-8350. Overall, the group feels that AMD has at least closed the gap a bit on Intel’s Core juggernaut with a much better FX offering this time around, but overall the desktop CPU landscape remains unchanged — with Intel still firmly at the top of the heap. Compared to its last-gen Bulldozer chips, “in every way, today’s FX-8350 is better,” according to Tom’s Hardware: cheaper, up to 15 percent faster and more energy efficient. Still, while the new CPUs represent AMD’s desktop high-end, they only stack up against Intel’s mid-range Core i5 family, and even against that line-up they only edge ahead in heavily threaded testing. But if you “look beyond those specific (multithreaded) applications, Intel can pull away with a significant lead” due to its superior design, says Anantech. As for power consumption, unfortunately “the FX-8350 isn’t even the same class of product as the Ivy Bridge Core i5 processors on this front,” claims The Tech Report.

Despite all that, Hot Hardware still sees several niches that AMD could fill with the new chips, as they’ll provide “an easy upgrade path for existing AMD owners and more flexibility for overclocking, due to its unlocked multipliers.” That means if you already have a Socket-AM3+ motherboard, you’ll be able to do a cheap upgrade by swapping in the new CPU, and punching up the clock cycles might close the performance gap enjoyed by the Core i5. Finally, AMD also saw fit to bring the new chip in at a “very attractive” $195 by Hexus‘ reckoning, a much lower price than an earlier leak suggested. Despite that, however, the site says that AMD’s flagship FX processor still “cannot tick as many desirable checkboxes as the competing Intel Core i5 chips.” Feel free to scope all the sources below to make your own conclusions.

Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Hexus
Read – The Tech Report

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, AMD

AMD FX-8350 review roundup: enthusiasts still won’t be totally enthused originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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