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Qualcomm's working on a new type of chip for Wear OS smartwatches
Google and Qualcomm join forces (again) for RISC-V in wearables
Open-source has long been touted as a revolution in the tech industry. Enter RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture that promotes innovation by allowing any entity to craft bespoke cores. This encourages an influx of players into the market, fostering innovation and competition, and ostensibly benefiting everyone from silicon vendors to the end consumers.
Xiaomi and Oppo plan to take on Qualcomm with their own smartphone chips
Creating independent supply chains before they become the next Huawei?
We only recently reported that Google was working on its own smartphone chip, but it looks like the company isn't the only one in the Android world wanting to go independent. A new report from DigiTimes (via Android Authority) claims that Xiaomi and Oppo are working on their own 5G-compatible chips.
Nvidia just purchased ARM for $40 billion
No immediate changes to Arm's open-licensing business are planned
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Arm Holdings is the company behind ARM processors, which power nearly every smartphone and tablet on Earth. SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016, and has been shopping around for potential buyers over the past few months. After days of speculation, it's now official that Nvidia is closing a deal to acquire ARM.
Huawei hosted a conference in Beijing today to showcase its upcoming 5G products: the Balong 5000, which it claims is the world's fastest 5G chip, and the 5G CPE Pro, a powerful home router. With these devices, the Chinese manufacturer is aiming at becoming a reference in 5G chips, and is trying to dethrone Qualcomm with a more powerful product.
Qualcomm is undeniably the darling of Android OEMs, with their chips being the only viable option for flagship smartphones and tablets. That's something MediaTek would obviously like to change with its latest premium SoC, the Helio P90.
Following a day of bad press regarding an undisclosed security vulnerability, Google pushed the message of strong security during its October 9th hardware reveal event. Among the announcements: the Mountain View-based tech giant has developed a dedicated chip for its mobile devices that integrates Titan Security, the system it built for Google data centers.
When an OEM chooses a Qualcomm SoC for a phone, the first thought is whether to include a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 800 series chip or something cheaper. The 700 series was recently unveiled, but before that the next best thing has been a 600 series processor such as the Snapdragon 660. Qualcomm's latest announcement introduces a successor, the predictably named Snapdragon 670.
When it comes to making processors for Android smartphones, Qualcomm is by far the market leader. MediaTek trails, focussing mainly on budget hardware, and then there are proprietary chips from the likes of Samsung and Huawei, but they aren't used outside of a few of their own products.
Last month, it was revealed that Facebook is working on its own smart speaker. That product has now been delayed amid Facebook's ongoing privacy scandals, but future versions of it could use Facebook's own chips. According to Bloomberg, the company is looking to design its own chipsets, based on recent job listings.
The smart speaker wars are in full swing, with Amazon and Google dominating most of the market. Amazon's Alexa assistant was first on the scene, but Google Assistant is making progress, particularly with the Home Mini and third-party speakers. According to a report from The Information, Amazon is working on its own AI chip designed to make Alexa-powered devices respond quicker.
The Exynos 9 Series processors were introduced by Samsung almost a year ago, and we've seen them used in the company's flagship phones of 2017. With the announcement of the Galaxy S9 nearing, it's time we learned a little about the chip that will be running the show (outside of the US and China, which will get Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 845 processor), so Samsung has lifted the covers off the Exynos 9810 SoC.
We've known for a while that Google was interested in making its own chips. Recently their hardware efforts even bore some fruit, but most of us assumed that it would be quite a while until Google made anything at a consumer level.
Intel may have decided that ARM's advantage within small devices and embedded systems is just too much to contend with, because now the world's largest semiconductor chip maker will start to fabricate ARM chips in its plants. Altera announced at a conference today that Intel would produce the company's ARM Cortex-A53 processor beginning next year. Who would have guessed that Intel would be the company to manufacture one of the world's first quad-core 64-bit ARM chips?
According to the aptly-named New Cell Phones Blog, photos of the "4.3-inch or 4.5-inch" Droid 5 have surfaced, which would confirm that Moto has another QWERTY slide-out keyboard in the works. The photos come to New Cell Phones courtesy of Weibo and show off a wireless charging coil. Other rumored features evidently include NFC and a resistance to both water and dust.
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.
According to a recent FCC filing, Qualcomm is hard at work on a new radio chipset that would support seven spectrum bands, including three below 1GHz. The introduction of this chipset could offer an effective solution to LTE spectrum fragmentation, which is a thorn in the side of manufacturers looking to cleanly execute broad product releases.
Could it be that HTC's Micro-Arc Oxidation process isn't all it's cracked up to be? The process, which HTC promoted in a video last month, involves running 10,000 volts of energy through aircraft-grade aluminum, creating a thin ceramic surface, and resulting in a body that's 5x stronger than aerospace aluminum and 3x stronger than stainless steel. HTC boasted that this process would essentially eliminate the need for any sort of protective case, but some users are beginning to second-guess the claim.
Qualcomm is going to release an upgraded version of its S4 generation Snapdragon chipset in the second half of 2012, the company announced at MWC 2012 today.
Despite all this talk about upcoming phones and tablets running on the Tegra 2 processor, you may want to stop and consider the new offering in the Snapdragon line of processors from Qualcomm. Taking a 28-nm dual core beast (MSM8960), the company promises speeds up to five times their current offerings, as well as 75% less lower power usage.