Hasta La Gadget!

The Internet of things — that nebulous term usually associated with interconnecting everyday objects in a meaningful way — is in the news again. Yesterday, Broadcom announced that it’s launching a couple cost-effective, power-efficient wireless chips geared towards appliances, home automation and wearable devices. The first SoC, BCM4390, incorporates a highly-efficient WiFi radio for embedded use in products such as weight scales, thermostats and security cameras. It fits into the company’s range of Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices (WICED) chips. The second SoC, BCM20732, features an ultra low-power Bluetooth transceiver and targets devices like heart rate monitors, pedometers and door locks. Broadcom’s also contributing its Bluetooth software stack to the Android Open Source Project with support for both standard and Bluetooth Smart hardware. Does this mean our long-awaited smart toaster’s just around the corner? We sure hope so. Follow the source links below for more info.

Filed under: Misc, Wireless

Comments

Source: Broadcom (1), (2)

The iPhone 5 already proved Apple’s desire to move away from existing processor designs and exert more control over these fundamental components. Is it too crazy to imagine that Cupertino would like the same sense of freedom with its laptops? Perhaps not, especially since the biggest company in the world just hired a guy called Jim Mergard, who helped to pioneer AMD’s low-power Brazos netbook chips and who had only recently moved to Samsung. A former colleague of Mergard’s, Patrick Moorhead, told the WSJ that he would be “very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple” — possibly based on a mobile-style SoC (system-on-chip) rather than a traditional PC approach. That’s pure speculation of course, but funnily enough it’s where Intel seems to be headed too.

Filed under: Laptops, Apple, Samsung, AMD

Low-power chip guru quits Samsung for Apple, with heavily implied implications originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Wall Street Journal  | Email this | Comments

It’s hard not to be impressed by the A6 engine in the new iPhone 5, since it’s now proven to deliver a double-shot of great performance and class-leading battery life. But silicon stories like that don’t happen over night or even over the course of a year — in fact, analyst Linley Gwennap has traced the origins of the A6 all the way back to 2008, when Steve Jobs purchased processor design company P.A. Semi and set one of its teams to work on creating something “insanely great” for mobile devices.

Although Apple is steadfastly secretive about its components, Gwennap’s history of the A6 (linked below) is both plausible and a straight-up good read for anyone interested in the more fundamental aspects of their gadgets. Whereas the A5 processor stuck closely to ARM’s Cortex-A9 design, Gwennap is convinced — just like Anandtech is –that the A6 treads a very different path: it’s still based on ARM’s architecture and it’s likely fabricated by Samsung using a cutting-edge 32nm process, but it’s an in-house vision of what a mobile chip should be. It’s the culmination of four years of hard work and perhaps half a billion dollars of investment.

That’s not to say it’s the most powerful chip out there, or even the chip most tailored to its host device — after all, Samsung also designs great chips for some of its own smartphones. Indeed, Gwennap says that the A6 is probably a dual-core processor that is no more complex than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 (let alone the S4 Pro) or the forthcoming generation of Cortex-A15 chips, while its clock speed could be as low as 1.2GHz — versus a 1.6GHz quad-core Exynos in the Note II and even a 2GHz Intel chip in Motorola’s new RAZR i. However, Gwennap predicted that even if the A6 falls short of its rivals “in raw CPU performance,” it’d make up for it in terms of low power consumption — which is precisely what we’ve confirmed in our review.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

How the iPhone 5 got its ‘insanely great’ A6 processor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET  |  The Linley Group  | Email this | Comments

While we fritter away our hours sharing cat pictures on Facebook, Samsung prefers to issue forth teasers for its forthcoming products. The latest is the above snap, raising hopes that its Series 5 Hybrid PC will be formally announced a teutonic trade show IFA this week. The 11-inch Transformer-esque device features a tablet that’s magnetically-attached to a keyboard dock, running “full” Windows 8 on Intel’s Clover Trail x86 architecture. In addition to Redmond’s newest OS, it’ll use native versions of the S-Pen apps we’ve used on the Galaxy Note 10.1, although it’s probably too much to hope that it’ll be able to make calls like its cousin.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets

Samsung teasing Series 5 Hybrid PC announcement at IFA originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Verge  |  Samsung (Facebook)  | Email this | Comments

We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget inquiry is coming to us from Is from Martin, who is looking for a hyper-efficient media streamer for his retro caravan. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“My partner and I are renovating a small ’70s caravan and would like a power-efficient media center/PC purely to watch our library of movies and TV shows. We’re in Australia, so getting hold of kit like the Raspberry Pi would be difficult, we’re looking for something that’s equally power efficient, even up to $300 AUD (around $310 USD). Cheers!””

That’s this week’s challenge, Engadgeteers — do you feel up for it? Can you help our southern hemisphere friends find a power-efficient HTPC for under $310 that won’t drain a retro-caravan’s batteries? Can we help these people turn the temporary home into a rockin’ media-streamin’ paradise? Hit us up in the comments if you’ve got some expertise to share.

Ask Engadget: Best sub-$310 power-efficient HTPC for a caravan? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments