Hasta La Gadget!

Texas Instruments has announced it will scale back its mobile processor business, no longer targeting smartphones and tablets, but instead eyeing the embedded systems market. The surprise news follows further contractions in TI’s business, most recently seeing long-standing customer Motorola pick up Intel’s Medfield for the RAZR i, though TI says it will continue to support its existing clients, Reuters reports.

Nonetheless, that sounds like something of a stop-gap measure as TI exits the mobile chip industry. “We believe that opportunity is less attractive as we go forward” TI senior VP for embedded processing Greg Delagi said of phone and tablet chipsets; the company will no longer invest to the same extent in its customers roadmaps for upcoming models.

Exactly what sort of timescale TI has in mind for that scaled-back involvement is unclear, and the market has already reacted pessimistically. Delagi conceded that the embedded systems market would take more time to develop than the hotly-contested wireless market, but insisted that the transition would “generate a more stable, profitable long-term business” for TI as a result.

TI’s embedded chips are finding their way into increasingly complex in-car systems, driving internet-connected navigation and entertainment, as well as other industries where the gigahertz-chasing of mobile isn’t such an issue. The rapid evolution of wireless chipsets, as well as companies like Apple and Samsung opting to make their own ARM-based processors rather than externally source them, means competition has grown significantly in recent months.

Nonetheless, it’s an unusual decision to have made, and one TI’s partners are likely looking at with no small degree of suspicion. Barnes & Noble’s new NOOK HD and HD+ tablets, for instance, are based on Texas Instrument’s OMAP4xxx series of chipsets, and RIM has used TI chips for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Many of TI’s more recent high-profile launches have shifted away from such applications, however, including a push into the so-called “internet of things.”

Texas Instruments sidelines phone and tablet chip business is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Intel’s first LTE-capable Medfield smartphone chips are in the pipeline, along with multicore versions of the processor, with the first examples due before the end of 2012. Intel will be “shipping some LTE products later this year and ramping into 2013″ director of product marketing Sumeet Syal told TechCrunch, and in the meantime the company is working on fettling more Android apps to suit the x86 architecture.

That software hiccup could be a headache to Intel and its manufacturer partners, with devices like the freshly announced Motorola RAZR i unable to run certain software available through Google’s Play store. Google’s own Chrome browser, for instance, currently won’t work on the RAZR i, though Motorola has confirmed it should be functional by the time the midrange smartphone actually reaches the market.

“We’re not quoting any numbers” Syal says, “but the majority of all the apps we’ve tested work just fine.” The company’s team responsible for software has been working “constantly round the clock to make sure that all these apps work” and the number of compatible titles increases every day.

As for multicore, initially that will mean dualcore Medfield, with Intel not ready to talk about quadcore Atom processors for phones as yet. Intel, though, is in no great rush Syal insists, content with its hyper threading system that milks two threads out of a single core.

“You have to take a look at how many instructions per clock can the architecture handle — our belief is that others are throwing cores at the issue in terms  of getting more performance.  We make that determination based on our architecture so we felt very comfortable coming out with a single core dual-threaded for our first product, and as we’re able to get more and more performance in the right implementation of the architecture we believe putting in dual-core would be the right thing for our next generation product” Sumeet Syal, Intel

Timelines for the dualcore Medfield versions have not been revealed yet, and nor has Intel disclosed when the first Atom-based smartphones might arrive in the US.

Intel: LTE Medfield by end of 2012 plus dualcore incoming is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

These days, we have a better idea of what the Wii U is packing under the hood. While there are some aspects of the Wii U that are clearly better than the Xbox 360 or PS3, the CPU isn’t one of them. We don’t know everything about the Wii U’s CPU just yet (clock speed, for instance, is still a mystery), but we do know that it comes from IBM and features three Power PC cores.

That underwhelming CPU is giving one Wii U launch developer some trouble. During the Tokyo Game Show, Eurogamer sat down with Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper producer Akihiro Suzuki, who says that the Wii U’s CPU tends to have some issues when there are multiple characters on screen, which is pretty much always the case when playing a Dynasty Warriors game. “One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less,” Suzuki said. “So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU.”

Suzuki followed up by saying that dealing with those performance issues can be “a challenge,” but did also point out that as far as sheer graphics power is concerned, the Wii U has the 360 and PS3 beat. Not only does the Wii U feature what is believed to be a custom AMD 7 series GPU, but it’s been confirmed to house 1GB of RAM that is dedicated to games, which is twice the amount the 360 and PS3 can boast. This means games which are more GPU-intensive will shine on Wii U, while those that require some significant CPU power risk falling flat.

It’s important to keep in mind that as time goes on, developers will figure out how to squeeze the most power out of the Wii U’s CPU. All you need to do is look at this generation to see that much is true – compare titles like The Last of Us or Uncharted 3 to games that launched at the beginning of the generation, and you’ll surely notice a sizable boost in overall quality. It seems safe to assume that we can expect a similar progression with games on Wii U, so this is just probably one of those launch hurdles that most developers have to deal with. Check our story timeline below for more on the Wii U!

Wii U’s slow CPU “a challenge” for one launch developer is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Every new iPhone needs a new engine, and Tim Cook has just made some bold claims about Apple’s latest silicon creation: the A6 processor. He hinted at a significant shrinkage in transistor size, allowing the chip to be 22 percent smaller than the A5 and hence more energy-efficient, while at the same time — he says — doubling all-round CPU and graphics capabilities. By way of practical benefits, the Apple CEO promises the Pages app will load up 2.1x faster than before, while Keynote attachments will hit the screen 1.7x faster. At this point we’re lacking any further detail about cores or clock speeds or indeed who actually fabricated the A6 (still Samsung, after all that bitterness?), but Apple does tend to be close-lipped on such things. In the meantime, bring on the benchmarks!

Check out all the coverage at our iPhone 2012 event hub!

Apple: A6 chip in iPhone 5 has 2x CPU power, 2x graphics performance, yet consumes less energy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Heterogeneous System Architecture might not be a phrase that trips off your tongue right now, but if AMD, TI and – in a quiet addition – Samsung have their way, you could be taking advantage of it to interact with the computers of tomorrow. AMD VP Phil Rogers, president of the HSA Foundation, filled his IFA keynote with futurology and waxing lyrical about how PCs, tablets and other gadgets will react to not only touch and gestures, but body language and eye contact, among other things. Check out the concept demo after the cut.

Heterogeneous System Architecture is a catch-all for scalar CPU processing and parallel GPU processing, along with high-bandwidth memory access for boosting app performance while minimizing power consumption. In short, it’s what AMD has been pushing for with its APUs (and, elsewhere – though not involved with HSA – NVIDIA has with its CUDA cores), with the HSA seeing smartphones, desktops, laptops, consumer entertainment, cloud computing, and enterprise hardware all taking advantage of such a system.

While there were six new public additions to the Foundation, Samsung Electronics’ presence came as a surprise. The HSA was initially formed by AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, and Texas Instruments, but today’s presentation saw Samsung added to the slides and referred to as a founding member.

Samsung is no stranger to heterogeneous computing tech. Back in October 2011, the company created the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (along with Micron) to push a new, ultra-dense memory system that – running at 15x the speed of DDR3 and requiring 70-percent less energy per bit – would be capable of keeping up with multicore technologies. The Cubes would be formed of a 3D stack of silicon layers, formed on the logic layer and then with memory layers densely stacked on top.

As for the concept, Rogers described a system which could not only learn from a user’s routine, but react to whether they were smiling or not, whereabouts at the display they were looking, and to more mundane cues such as voice and gesture. Such a system could offer up a search result and then, if the user was seen to be smiling at it, learn from that reaction to better shape future suggestions.

Exactly when we can expect such technology to show up on our desktop (or, indeed, in laptops, phones and tablets) isn’t clear. However, Samsung has already been experimenting with devices that react to the user in basic ways; the Galaxy S III, for instance, uses eye-recognition to keep the screen active even if it’s not being touched, while its camera app includes face- and smile-recognition.

Your next Samsung could learn to love your smile is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.