The hits keep coming from IDF. After showing off svelte new 14nm silicon built for laptops, CEO Brian Krzanich announced a brand new SoC series named Quark. It’s the smallest SoC the company has ever built, one-fifth the size of an Atom chip, and is built upon an open architecture meant so spur its use. Early on in his keynote, Krzanich said that Intel plans to “lead in every segment of computing,” and Quark is positioned to put Intel in wearables — and, in fact, he even showed off a prototype smartwatch platform Intel constructed to help drive wearable development. And, Intel President Renee James pointed out that Quark’s designed for use in integrated systems, so we’ll be seeing Quark in healthcare and municipal use cases, too. Unfortunately, no details about the new SoC’s capabilities or specs are yet available, but we can give you some shots of Intel’s wearable wristband prototype in our gallery below.%Gallery-slideshow83631%
When MediaTek announced that it would be producing true eight-core mobile processors later this year, we knew it was only a matter of time before its main rival Qualcomm chimed in. As illustrated by a set of guitar amplifiers, the San Diego gang explains that while they rebuild their CPU cores for each generation (the latest architectures being Krait 300 and Krait 400), they claim that “Our Competitor” — which is labeled with the same font and colors as MediaTek’s logo — simply “chooses to duplicate the same old cores” based on ARM’s slower Cortex-A7 architecture. That said, it’s worth a reminder that Qualcomm’s cheaper Snapdragon 400 range also uses Cortex-A7.
Later on in the video, Qualcomm uses a Guitar Hero-like visualization to compare the performance difference, as well as show how octa-core is overrated for most apps. Apparently only 17 out of the top 20 Android apps in China use two cores at most, hence the bare fretboard for the octa-core side. The Snapdragon side, meanwhile, combs through a denser bunch of apps at a higher speed. Of course, there’s bound to be some bias here, so only time will tell how close to reality this argument is. Until then, enjoy the cheeky clip after the break.
Apple’s iPhone 5S will be “about 31-percent faster” than the iPhone 5 and include new motion-tracking technology, insiders claim, sparking speculation about the presumed Apple A7 processor expected to power the next-gen flagship phone. “Sources are telling me the new iPhone’s A7 chip is running at about 31% faster than A6″ Fox News’s Clayton Morris […]
It would appear that the folks at Intel are not giving up – by any means – on their ventures into the smartphone and tablet universe as a roadmap of processor architecture leaks today. This selection of next-generation hardware will be used in Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Android 4.2 devices, leaving Windows RT in […]
Earlier today, tech media outlets were buzzing because Qualcomm’s VP Anand Chandrasekher presented a deck of slides (to a media group in Taiwan) that included a very specific message: among the things that are “dumb”, “Eight-core CPUs” make it to the top of the list.
It’s not every day that you see two tablet leaks in one day with the same processor under the hood – but that’s just what’s happened with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 in this afternoon’s appearance of the fabled Nokia tablet. This tablet works with code-name Nokia RX-114 and likely runs either full Windows 8 or Windows RT, pushing with it the same processor we saw appear on this morning’s reboot of the Kindle Fire.
Could the Qualcomm suggestion that every major OEM in the industry has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor-toting device in the pipeline? It would seem that in addition to the devices we already know run the Snapdragon 800 – like the Samsung Galaxy S 4 LTE-Advanced, we’ll be seeing this quad-core SoC hit the tablet world with force.
Here the Nokia RX-114 is appearing via benchmarking suite GFXBench – which, if you’re curious, can be spoofed – with the following screen size attached: 1371 x 771. That’s pixels across its long side and its short side, suggesting this machine isn’t your everyday ordinary tablet. Microsoft’s Surface works with 1366 x 768 pixels across its 10.6-inch face, so it wouldn’t be that far off from the competition.
Of course when you compare that to even last years’ Nexus 10 tablet with its 2560 x 1600 pixels inside 10.055 inches of display, there’s really a different generation of device appearing. Either this Nokia device is a phablet, or it’s about to find itself out of sorts before it launches.
But consider that – what if it is a large display-toting smartphone? We just saw a faceplate that might match up in a 6-inch panel leaked to a factory floor, and the Nokia Lumia 625 was just delivered with a low-resolution display and a small price tag.
Perhaps we’ll see something similar in the very near future.
It’ll be a while before MediaTek’s true octa-core SoC makes its glorious arrival, but for the time being, the company’s unveiling something just as interesting — and perhaps more practical. The new MT8135 announced today is a “quad-core” SoC aimed at “the middle- to high-end tier of the tablet OEM market.” We quote “quad-core,” because it actually consists of two clusters: dual Cortex-A15 cores and dual Cortex-A7 cores. But the good news is that unlike the original big.LITTLE configuration where only one cluster can operate at any given time (depending on how heavy the workload is), MediaTek’s confirmed that it has implemented big.LITTLE MP (“MP” as in heterogeneous multi-processing) in the MT8135, meaning both the A15 and the A7 clusters can operate simultaneously.
Another highlight of this MT8135 is that it’ll be one of the first SoCs — alongside LG’s H13 (which we’ve seen first-hand), Renesas’ APE6 and Renesas’ R-Car H2 — to come with Imagination Technologies’ almighty PowerVR Series6 GPU. Specifically, this is the PowerVR G6200 which, as part of the MT8135, can apparently deliver “up to four times more ALU (arithmetic logic unit) horsepower” than the Series5XT GPU on the cheaper, quad-A7 MT8125. And unsurprisingly, the MT8135 gets the same Miracast wireless video goodie given to the MT8125; though it’s also worth noting that the latter only supports LPDDR2 RAM instead of the more powerful LPDDR3.
Sadly, there’s no further information regarding availability, but you can kill some time by checking out more technical details in the video (with benchmarks) and press releases after the break.
This week NVIDIA is once again blurring the lines between desktop and mobile graphics with a note on the introduction of Kepler technology into their next-generation mobile processor. NVIDIA suggests that, “from a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago.” This is the first set of details we’re getting on Project Logan, the next processor architecture in the Tegra chipset family.
You’ll remember the comic book character collection of code-names for the processors that’ve become the Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 – and what we must assume will be the Tegra 5 as well. Here with what’s still called Project Logan, NVIDIA makes clear their intent to bring graphics processing abilities until now reserved for desktop machines to the mobile realm; for tablets, smartphones, and everything in between.
In addition to deploying Kepler’s efficient processing powers to the Logan mobile SoC, NVIDIA intents on bringing the excellence in a form that the company will be able to license to others. This licensing was outlined earlier this year amid the latest Kepler integrations into GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.
NVIDIA suggests that the technology deployed with mobile Kepler is able to use one-third the power of “GPUs in leading tablets, such as the retinal iPad”, while it performs identical renderings. They also note that this efficiency is achieved with mobile Kepler without compromising graphics capabilities, working with OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, and everything else in the OpenGL universe.
Though we’re expecting this architecture to hit Google’s Android – as NVIDIA has been hitting for the past several years – they do mention that the technology also supports DirectX, the latest graphics API from Microsoft. Think Windows RT and Windows 8 – NVIDIA’s been there before.
Working with these current and next-generation APIs allow NVIDIA to bring on graphics unlike any seen in the mobile universe, developers taking hold of these environments with a variety of high-end rendering and simulation techniques. NVIDIA runs down three of the most powerful:
Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.
Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in the scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.
Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.
NVIDIA makes clear that a lovely collection of processing-heavy tasks will be able to be carried out with this next-generation solution including computer vision, augmented reality, computational imaging, and speech recognition. Showed off this week at Siggraph was a return of the digital head now known as “Ira”, aka Faceworks.
Stick around as we continue to jump deeper into the next big superhero-themed processor, one that’ll break barriers beyond what we’re only just seeing now with the NVIDIA Tegra 4 – living inside NVIDIA SHIELD and getting pumped up for benchmarks sooner than later!
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.
Just because Qualcomm’s gone to plaid (aka. reached ludicrous speed) with its Snapdragon 800 flagship doesn’t mean the company’s been standing still at the other end of the market. The Snapdragon 200 family just received a major boost with the introduction of six new chips geared at China and other emerging markets. Available with dual- and quad-core CPUs, the processors are manufactured using a 28nm process and incorporate HSPA+ (21Mbps) and TD-SCDMA radios. The new SoCs are optimized to provide good multimedia performance and long battery life, with support for dual cameras (up to 8MP rear and 5MP front), multiple SIMs (dual standby, dual active and tri standby), iZat location tech and Quick Charge 1.0. Qualcomm’s Adreno 302 GPU rounds up the spec list, making these chips well suited for devices running Android, Windows Phone and Firefox OS. The company’s expected to begin shipping these new processors (8×10 and 8×12) in late 2013. Full PR after the break.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Earlier today, tech media outlets were buzzing because 
