06
May
Intel

Intel's New 'Silvermont' Architecture Will Offer Three Times The Peak Performance In Atom Processors, One Fifth The Power Consumption

Posted by in News

Most smartphone manufacturers have chosen to ignore Intel's mobile offerings in favor of ARM chips, but Intel is hoping to change their minds with its latest microarchitecture. Today Intel unveiled Silvermont, which reportedly will result in new mobile chips with three times the performance of current-gen Intel Atom processors. Alternatively, Silvermont will enable Intel's next-gen Merrifield smartphone chips to achieve the same performance levels as Clover Trail+ with one-fifth of the power consumption.

silver

Want more specifics? Other advertised features of Silvermont include:

  • A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.
  • A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.

09
Jan
2013-01-09_13h11_21

[CES 2013] Samsung Announces The Exynos 5 Octa, A Screaming 28nm 8-Core Processor

Posted by in News, Samsung

Oh man, if you thought quad-core phones were crazy, your brain should prepare itself for at least twice as much explosion. Samsung just announced at CES its new Exynos 5 Octa processors. These chips, on a 28nm architecture (which means they're small and use less power) have eight dang cores. The company says that this will result in up to 70% battery savings (compared to what is unclear...we would assume the previous Exynos processor).

octa1 octa2 octa3

Pics courtesy of CNET

Of course, the first thought is, "Do we really need that many cores?!" Well, for starters, yes. We'll always want more power.

07
Jan
800

[CES 2013] Qualcomm Announces Next Generation Snapdragon Mobile Processors With A New Naming Scheme

Posted by in News

If you thought the Snapdragon S4 Pro in the Droid DNA was snappy, get ready to redefine snappy. Not to be outdone by NVIDIA's Tegra 4 announcement yesterday, Qualcomm has detailed its own 2013 ARM chips. The S4, S3, etc. naming scheme is no more – the new chips are the Snapdragon 800, Snapdragon 600, Snapdragon 400 and Snapdragon 200. The 600 and 800 are the new high-performance processors in Qualcomm's lineup, and that's where the company is focusing most of its attention.

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The Snapdragon 600 will be running on four new Krait 300 cores (at clock speeds up to 1.9GHz), and should be able to deliver 40% more power than the S4 Pro while consuming less battery.

07
Jan
image

[CES 2013] Intel Uncovers Low-Power Atom Platform For 'Value Smartphone' Market, 'Bay Trail' Quad Core SoC For Tablets

Posted by in Android OS, News

Intel, not to be left out of the early CES fun, had a couple of announcements for tech fans today – a low-powered platform formerly known as "Lexington," (lovingly called Atom Z2420) for "emerging" value smartphone markets, and the Atom Z2760, codenamed "Bay Trail" headed for tablets and higher-end smartphones.

Intel says that it's already found partners in Acer, Lava International, and Safaricom for the Z2420 platform, and that the chip will be capable of 1.2GHz speed, 1080p hardware acceleration, and support for two cameras (with burst mode). With the Z2420, Intel is hoping to target what most call the budget smartphone market, which their release indicates will reach 500 million units by 2015 according to "industry sources."

The high-end Bay Trail SoC, meanwhile, is a quad core, 22nm chip that Intel hopes will expand tablet prospects in both the Windows 8 and Android arenas.

30
Oct
image

ARM Announces Cortex-A50 Series – 64-Bit Processors 'Set To Drive The Next Era In Mobile And Enterprise'

Posted by in Android OS, News

At ARM TechCon today, the titular purveyor of semiconductors announced its Cortex-A50 series, dubbed "the world's most energy-efficient 64-bit processors." Based on the ARMv8 architecture, the line will launch with the Cortex-A53 and A57 processors, allowing not only for significantly more energy-efficient processing, but SoC scalability that makes the line applicable to devices from smartphones to high-performance servers. The A57 is geared toward high-performance, while the A53 is lauded by ARM as its most power-efficient. Both chips also support 32-bit and 64-bit ARM code, and according to ARM, the A53 can live up to the performance of the Cortex A9 at 60% the die area.

15
Oct
2012-10-15_14h10_02

[Rumor] Amazon Is In Talks To Acquire TI's Mobile Processor Business, Puts On Its Big Boy Business Suit

Posted by in Amazon, News

Before we get too far into this, let's point out that this rumor is coming from an Israeli newspaper, so it is easy enough for a company to disavow stories like these. With that disclaimer out of the way: Amazon may be looking into buying Texas Instrument's OMAP business. As we already know, TI has expressed interest in getting out of the mobile game. Not to say they'll stop making processors, but that the focus would be less on tablets and phones, and more on embedded SoCs for a variety of applications (such as automotive, vision, and robotics).

Of course, Amazon uses TI's mobile processors for its Kindle Fire line, which runs a very heavily modified version of Android.

26
Feb
huawei

Huawei Unveils Ascend D Quad, D Quad XL, D1, K3V2 Quad-Core Processor, Gives Itself "World's Fastest Smartphone" Title

Posted by in Ascend D Quad, Huawei, News, Videos

We're in Barcelona this afternoon (or, in the US, this morning), and Huawei has just taken the wraps off its latest and greatest smartphone - the Ascend D Quad. It's almost as thought the name is suggesting something about the phone's hardware.

Powering the device is Huawei's first in-house smartphone processor - the K3V2. It has four cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. It's really fast. That's about all we know at this point.

huaweidq huaweidqwhite

But back to the Ascend D Quad (I'm going to call it the Ascend DQ for short - anyone up for a Blizzard?). So, aside from its K3V2, what's the DQ got going for it?

21
Feb
msm89601

New 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (MSM8960) Dual-Core CPU Benchmarked, Absolutely Blows The Socks Off All Other Publicly Released Phone CPUs

Posted by in News

The de facto hardware experts over at AnandTech have spent some time with the newest CPU from Qualcomm: the MSM8960, sporting the new 28nm Krait architecture in dual-core, 1.5GHz form. They've put it through their suite of benchmarks including Linpack, SunSpider, BrowserMark, Vellamo, and Basemark OS. In a nutshell: the MSM8960 absolutely destroys every other phone/CPU on the market right now in every. single. benchmark.

msm89601

An example of what to expect.

The Krait architecture supports 1, 2, and 4 CPUs, and the smaller transistor size (28nm) means that it should outperform most (if not all) comparative 40nm CPUs and offer better battery life.

11
Jan
wm_IMG_9918

[CES 2012] Video Hands-On With The World's First Intel-Powered Smartphone: The Lenovo K800

Posted by in K800, Lenovo, Videos
Last Updated: January 13th, 2012

It's finally happening - Intel processors are coming to Android phones, for better or for worse (we tend to think it's going to be the former). The world's first Intel smartphone? The Lenovo K800. But the real question is, is it actually going to be any good? Judging by the short time we spent with the device earlier today, the answer is a pretty emphatic "nope." The device in question has a 1280x720 4.5" display, 1.6GHz Z2460 Atom processor (single core with hyperthreading), and an 8MP camera.

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wm_IMG_9911 wm_IMG_9918

wm_IMG_9923 wm_IMG_9912 wm_IMG_9915

While this isn't the completely finished product, Lenovo has said the device will be shipping in China (and likely never in the US) in Q2 this year, which is an ample amount of time for some, shall we say, improvements.

10
Jan
LpNQg

[CES 2012] Intel And Lenovo Announce Medfield-Powered K800 Lenovo Smartphone, Headed To China In Q2

Posted by in Android OS, Lenovo, News
Last Updated: January 11th, 2012

Intel and Lenovo just announced the world's first Intel-powered Android smartphone: the K800. It utilizes Intel's Medfield mobile platform, with what we assume is the Atom Z2460 1.6GHz processor. Intel and Lenovo claim that the new Medfield platform is a "no compromise" mobile processor in terms of performance and battery life, though no exact figures were quoted. It actually looks pretty similar to Intel's reference device, and will be available in China (no US availability announced) some time in Q2.

XECth

Intel also demoed said reference device on stage, but didn't tell us anything we don't already know. Intel was keen on showing off the battery life of its reference device, which while it only has a 1440mAh battery, manages an impressive 8 hours of 3G talk time, and a full 5 hours of 3G web browsing.

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