We’re still waiting for the first OMAP 4 devices to hit the market, but TI’s planning ahead — way ahead — with its announcement today of the OMAP 5 platform that really kicks things into high gear. The headline feature would be the inclusion of two Cortex-A15 cores, each running at up to 2GHz; Cortex-A15 is the fastest architecture ARM has announced to date, featuring performance roughly 50 percent better than Cortex-A9 at the same clock speed. What’s more, there are another two Cortex-M4 processors along for the ride, ready to take over less intensive tasks at much lower power consumption to improve device responsiveness. The platform can support up to four cameras operating at the same time, offer 3D playback, recording, and 2D upsampling to 3D at 1080p resolution, and control up to 8GB of RAM. The chips start sampling to device manufacturers in the second half of this year with retail devices expected in the second half of 2012. Follow the break for the full press release.
Victorinox USB drives are among the smallest and most elegant thumb drives we’ve seen. These models don’t have knives — they’re just storage — so you can take them safely on board a plane.
Deep in the bowels of the Las Vegas Convention Center last week, we found Victorinox, makers of fine folding Swiss Army knives.
They’ve made the leap into the 21st century with USB drives that form part of their knives’ complement of tools. What we didn’t expect was just how much data they’ve managed to cram into a tiny, elegant, folding package.
The Victorinox Slim is available in capacities up to 64GB. A larger model, the Slim Duo, includes two side-by-side drives for a maximum total capacity of 128GB.
Both are about as big as three or four dimes laid end to end, and fit nicely into even very cramped USB slots.
Like the Sandisk microSD card we mentioned last year, the Victorinox drives manage to cram so much data into such a tiny space by layering memory chips on top of one another inside the skinny, 1mm thick chip package that forms the heart of the drive. It’s an impressive feat of electronic engineering.
The fact that the drives have an understated Swiss Army knife design is pretty nice, too.
LAS VEGAS — Microsoft unveiled its vision of the future, where everything from phones and tablets to big-ass tables runs Windows.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a somnolescent and nearly news-free keynote presentation on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show here, laying out his company’s strategy for home entertainment, mobile content, PCs and tablets.
“Whatever device you use, now or in the future, Windows will be there,” Ballmer said.
For home entertainment, that means games, video and music delivered via Xbox 360 and its hit wireless, touchless controller, Kinect. Microsoft has sold 8 million Kinect kits since it was first released two months ago.
In one of the keynote’s few bits of original news, Microsoft announced that Xbox 360 users would soon be able to use Kinect to control Netflix via gestures and voice. In addition, Hulu Plus will be coming to Xbox 360 this spring, also with Kinect support.
The Xbox avatar of Steve Ballmer delivers the news about Kinect’s improved facial expression feature, avatarKinect. Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
And Kinect now has enhanced face recognition, so it can identify smiles, eyebrow raises and other facial gestures, mapping those onto your Xbox avatar, which then moves and makes expressions in an odd, artificial mimicry of what your body is doing.
In one of the keynote’s more surreal moments, Ballmer’s avatar delivered the news about the new feature, called avatarKinect.
For smartphones, Microsoft is betting on Windows Phone 7. Ballmer reprised the company’s launch of the platform in late 2010, and announced that it would soon be adding cut-and-paste support to the mobile OS.
Ballmer also showed off a new version of Microsoft Surface, the company’s often-mocked multitouch-capable table. The new version uses infrared sensors instead of cameras, enabling it to be just 4 inches thick (thin enough to mount on a wall for kiosk use). Its “Pixel Sense” technology also detects visual information, not just touch, so it can “see” objects or writing material laid on top of it.
For everything else, however, Microsoft is counting on Windows 7 and its successors.
That means Windows will be the platform of choice for nearly all devices, from tiny slates to full-fledged PCs and even large kiosk devices like the Microsoft Surface.
To make good on that vision, Microsoft is developing versions of Windows that will run on the low-power ARM processors found in many smartphones and some tablets today.
Microsoft demonstrates a version of Windows running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
Microsoft demonstrated Windows running on prototype systems built around chips from ARM manufacturers Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia. (Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip is used in two new dual-core smartphones from Motorola and LG.) The demos included such bread-and-butter Windows features as Internet Explorer, PowerPoint and network printing, all of which seemed impressively fast despite the low-power chips at the systems’ hearts.
The company is also aiming to beef up support for other “system-on-a-chip” devices, by which it means any CPU that incorporates a wider range of functions that are typically found in computer processors. For instance, Intel’s new graphics-enhanced chips and AMD’s Fusion APUs (which combine a CPU and GPU capabilities in one chip) were also featured in the onstage demos.
“Support for system on a chip means Windows will be everywhere, on every kind of device, without compromise. All the power and flexibility of Windows on low-power, long-lasting devices,” Ballmer said.
“You’ll be able to use Windows anywhere you go, from the small screen to the big screen.”
Texas Instruments has just announced its latest DLP projector chipset, the Pico HD. The newest, tiny chipset offer HD WXGA resolution projections of up to 100 inches, and promises to be brighter and clearer than ever. So what does this mean to you, the consumer? Well, Texas Instruments is promising a host of hardware partners showing off their brand spanking new projecting wares. We don’t have full details yet, but we do know that we can expect to see Acer unveil its HW300T pocket projector, while ViewSonic will show the PLED-W200 DLP Pico projector, and offerings from Optoma and LG to boot. We’ll track them all down for you as soon as our tiny hands possibly can. And that, in a nutshell, is our Texas Instruments pico news of the day. The full-fledged, not in a nutshell press release is after the break.
Phones and tablets based on TI’s first production OMAP4 processor — the OMAP4430 — won’t even be on the market until early next year, but TI’s already planning ahead with the announcement of an upgraded chip that promises a 50 percent boost in overall performance. The new OMAP4440 can send its two Cortex-A9-based cores as high as 1.5GHz, while the 4430 tops out at 1GHz; TI says that means we should expect a 1.25x improvement in graphics performance, a 30 percent decline in webpage load time, and 1080p playback performance that doubles the slowpoke (comparably speaking, anyway) 4430. The company expects to sample these little speed demons to manufacturers in the first quarter of next year with volume shipment coming in the second half, itching to do battle with Samsung’s Orion; in the meantime, we suppose your 4430 will have to do. Follow the break for the press release.
The POV.HD video system is a new offering from V.I.O positioned as a more professional-grade alternative to other film-through-hell helmet cameras such as the GoPro HD or Drift Innovations HD170. Its two-ounce IP67 certified camera sports a six-element glass lens and a native 1080p CMOS sensor that can capture a 142 degree field-of-view — claimed to be the widest on the market — in full HD at 30fps. The head unit can also be adjusted to record 720p at 60fps with a 92 degree FOV for faster shots. A separate recording unit features Texas Instruments’ latest Da Vinci DM368 processor and supports a real-time video pipeline while storing up to 4.3 hours of 1080p H.264 video footage on a 32GB of SDHC. It’s also equipped with a two-inch LCD viewing screen with exposure and footage tagging controls. Priced at $600, V.I.O is currently accepting pre-orders, which if made between November 15th through December 17th, are guaranteed to arrive by December 22nd — just in time for your family’s’ homebrew holiday response to Jackass.
Barnes & Noble provided most of the specs for the Nook Color when it launched the device on Tuesday, but notably absent was any word on the processor that powers the e-reader. Thankfully, Texas Instruments has now come out confirmed that the Nook Color uses its ARM Cortex A8-based, 45nm OMAP3621 processor (still no word on the speed). What’s more, the processor is actually part of TI’s eBook Development Platform, which the Nook Color also relies on. That’s particularly interesting considering that the processor and platform support a few features that the Nook Color does not, not the least of which is 3G connectivity. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see a future Nook Color that takes advantage of those features, but at least we know it’s not too much of a stretch for Barnes & Noble to add them.
Update: Texas Instruments pinged us to say the chip within the Nook Color hums along at 800MHz.
We’ve seen a few examples of touchless, gesture-based interfaces for mobile devices, but it looks like Texas Instruments might be closer than most to making it a reality — it’s just announced a partnership with Extreme Reality (also known as XTR) on a new gesture engine and framework specifically designed for its OMAP 4 platform. The two companies actually showed off such a system back at MWC earlier this year (check out a demo of ti after the break), but they’ve only just now made the partnership official, and they’re promising plenty more advancements to come — including the ability to not only recognize simple gestures, but even things like whole body movements and two-handed gestures. Head on past the break for the complete press release.
Way to take the wind out of our sails, ARM — no sooner does your dual-core Cortex-A9 finallyship, do you reveal an even more powerful smartphone, smartbook and server-slaying beast. The Cortex-A15 MPCore picks up where the A9 left off, but with reportedly five times the power of existing CPUs, raising the bar for ARM-based single- and dual-core cell phone processors up to 1.5GHz… or as high as 2.5GHz in quad-core server-friendly rigs with hardware virtualization baked in and support for well over 4GB of memory. One terabyte, actually. Like we’d heard, the ARMv7-A “Eagle” chips are destined for Texas Instruments, but ST-Ericsson and Samsung as also named as “lead licensees,” so we fully expect to see some badass silicon powering a Galaxy when the 32nm and 28nm parts ship in 2013. Press release and video after the break, replete with ARM partner companies fawning over the new hotness. We can’t really blame them.
Five hundred eighty-three calculators, 128 brands and one man who has painstakingly cataloged them all.
Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.
It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15, in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.
“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window,” says Dudek who runs the Vintage Technology site. “The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations.”
Dudek’s online catalog of calculators is an impressive archive of calculators from one decade. Each of the 583 calculators on the site have size, power, case, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. The models also include comments explaining the components used, construction and the logic used.
Ultimately, Dudek hopes to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators he estimates were made in the 1970s.
“What I thought really interesting is that it not just has calculator information but also chip numbers from some of the old ICs used in the device,” says Matt Stack, a calculator enthusiast who recently created a graphing calculator built on open source hardware. ” I like to consider myself an expert in calculators and I learned something.”
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