SoCs
As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance. As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite...
AMD is Open to Integrating 3rd Party IP in Future SoCs
Don't expect AMD to go into much detail on this here at the Financial Analyst Day, but the slide above shows a definite step towards becoming a modern SoC...
2 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/2/2012
Snapdragon S4 “Krait” – MSM8960 GPU Benchmark Surfaces
A NenaMark 2 benchmark score for an unknown device based on Qualcomm’s upcoming 28nm Snapdragon S4 “Krait” MSM8960 SoC has just surfaced. The device seems to have 1.5Ghz CPU...
33 by Saumitra Bhagwat on 1/28/2012
Samsung Exynos 5250 Begins Sampling – Mass Production in Q2 2012
Back in November, Samsung announced its next generation Exynos 5250 SoC based on ARM’s Cortex-A15 architecture. Samsung confirmed today during its earnings call that the Exynos 5250 has begun...
32 by Saumitra Bhagwat on 1/27/2012
Why Thunderbolt Won't Come to the iPhone Anytime Soon
Before CES there was a bunch of silliness floating around about how Apple might bring Thunderbolt to the iPhone based on a creative interpretation of an Apple patent. Some...
14 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on 1/14/2012
TI Shows Off OMAP 5 & ARM Cortex A15 at CES
We weren't allowed to take photos but we've just seen TI's OMAP 5 reference platform up and running Ice Cream Sandwich with full GPU acceleration enabled. The 28nm chip...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on 1/12/2012
Intel Shows Off Competitive Medfield x86 Android Power & Performance
You may have seen some Medfield related news today - I thought I'd chime in with some of my thoughts on the topic. As a recap, in 2008 Intel...
39 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/21/2011
ARM & GlobalFoundries Demo 2.5GHz+ 28nm Cortex A9 & 20nm Test Vehicle
GlobalFoundries sent over a PR showcasing two significant milestones in its march towards being a major foundry player in the mobile space. The first is the announcement of a...
12 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/14/2011
ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
Going from making good motherboards to going head to head with Samsung for Google's affection is a pretty big step for ASUS, but it's one that the company has...
205 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/1/2011
Qualcomm Announces a Bunch of Krait Based Snapdragon S4 SoCs
In February at MWC, Qualcomm unveiled three SoCs based on its brand new Krait microarchitecture: the single/dual-core MSM8930, dual-core MSM8960 and the quad-core APQ8064. More recently, we dove into...
5 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/16/2011
Applied Micro's X-Gene: The First ARMv8 SoC
We covered the X-Gene announcement a couple of weeks ago when the news was first made public. I was in London at the time meeting with Nokia so I...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/14/2011
Samsung Licenses PowerVR SGX MP from Imagination Technologies
Samsung is a bit of a mobile GPU conoisseur it seems. Its previous flagship, Hummingbird, used a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU. Its most recent high-end SoC, the Exynos 4210...
18 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/10/2011
ARM's Mali-T658 GPU in 2013, Up to 10x Faster than Mali-400
ARM's licensed CPU cores dominate the mobile space. This year the core of choice for high-end smartphones and tablets is ARM's Cortex A9 and late next year it'll be...
21 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2011
NVIDIA's Tegra 3 Launched: Architecture Revealed
Originally announced in February of this year at MWC, NVIDIA is finally officially launching its next-generation SoC. Previously known under the code name Kal-El, the official name is Tegra...
94 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/9/2011
AppliedMicro Announces 64-bit ARM Based X-Gene SoCs
AppliedMicro has released specifications of their upcoming X-Gene SoC (Server-on-a-Chip this time, not System). AppliedMicro X-Gene Specifications Architecture ARMv8 Cores From 2 to up to 128 Frequency Up to 3GHz Process TSMC 40/28nm Power Usage Up to 2W per core Above...
23 by Kristian Vättö on 10/28/2011
Samsung Focus S & Flash: Official Images, 1.4GHz Mango Devices Shipping This Fall
The one area Microsoft hasn't touched while upgrading Windows Phone has been the SoC requirements. The platform launched with 65nm Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs featuring the quite-slow Adreno 200 GPU...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/19/2011
ARM's Cortex A7: Bringing Cheaper Dual-Core & More Power Efficient High-End Devices
How do you keep increasing performance in a power constrained environment like a smartphone without decreasing battery life? You can design more efficient microarchitectures, but at some point you’ll...
77 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/19/2011
ARM & Cadence Tape Out 20nm Cortex A15 Test Chip
Although we won't see the first ARM Cortex A15 based designs until the second half of next year, and even then only on 28/32nm processes, ARM and design tools...
13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/18/2011
iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks: ~800MHz A5, Slightly Slower GPU than iPad 2, Still Very Fast
Apple's ability to control the entire information chain, down to the point of limiting leaks, appears to be gradually slipping as it grows as a company. Case in point...
217 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 10/11/2011
Intel Focuses on Tablets, Winds Down Digital Home Group
Intel's Digital Home Group (DHG) is responsible for the consumer electronics versions of the Atom SoC family. Last year we saw the launch of the Boxee Box and Google...
7 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/10/2011
Qualcomm's New Snapdragon S4: MSM8960 & Krait Architecture Explored
Let's recap the current smartphone/tablet SoC landscape. Everything shipping today is built on a 4x-nm process, built either at Global Foundries, Samsung, TSMC or UMC. Next year we'll see...
108 by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/7/2011
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