ARM's CEO expects computers powered by the company's processors to hold 10 to 20 percent of the notebook PC market by 2015. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Warren East said (sub. required) he expects that ARM will have a bigger impact on the PC market than competitor Intel will have as it attempts to enter the smartphone market.
The Mozilla Foundation, maker of the Firefox web browser, is calling out Microsoft for anticompetitive practices with regard to browser capabilities on the upcoming Windows RT. In a blog post, Mozilla's General Counsel Harvey Anderson takes Microsoft to task for programming decisions that will limit the power and feature set of non-Internet Explorer browsers in the next version of Windows.
Chinese government officials are in the process of attempting to define a national processor architecture standard. If successful, the standard, which EE Times contends might emerge in the next few months, could dramatically alter computing in the world's largest country, and the ripple effects could change the way international companies do business in China.
Samsung on Wednesday ended one of the largest rumors surrounding the new Galaxy S with news of its main processor. The Exynos 4 Quad carries a namesake four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and is made on a newer, smaller 32 nanometer process. Although it clocks in at the same 1.4GHz as in newer Samsung phones, it's roughly twice as powerful while using 20 percent less power, the company claimed.
The market for embedded processors could grow to ten times the size of the market for mobile device chips, according to ARM CEO Warren East. In an interview with Mobile World Live, East indicated that while mobile devices remain a profitable sector for the company, ARM has its eye on getting its components into a much wider array of products.
Samsung's GT-i9300, possibly the third-generation Galaxy, has had its performance leaked through inadvertent postings to GLBenchmark. The 3D tests caught by a Phone Arena reader show that the quad-core Exynos 4412 chip in the device looks to beat any existing Android phone, and likely the iPhone 4S, by a wide margin. In the common-use Egypt test, the i9300 would be roughly a third faster than the similarly quad-core Tegra 3 in the international HTC One X and three times faster than Samsung's own Galaxy S II.
Samsung's May 3 event was spoiled in conspicuous fashion on Friday after Vietnam's Tinhte briefly posted (since pulled) a detailed look at what's now very likely to be the Galaxy S III. Previously seen earlier as the GT-i9300, the hardware appears to have roughly the physical footprint of the Galaxy S II but with a taller, 4.6-inch, 720p screen that uses Android 4.0's onscreen controls. A quad-core 1.4GHz chip (likely the Exynos 4412) makes it clear the device is high-end.
Following launch secrecy details, a second leak Wednesday has dropped hints that the Galaxy S III, or whatever the device is named, may be a breakthrough in speed. The same source for The Verge as earlier said it would use the rumored quad-core chip, likely the Exynos 4412, and deliver "superlative benchmark performance." The part isn't confirmed, but it's likely to be identical to the Samsung chip in the Meizu MX Quad-core, which could be 60 percent faster than the dual-core MX.
Taiwan-area contract manufacturers claimed Wednesday that Intel and Microsoft have ambitious aims of reducing the iPad's dominance of tablets. The Digitimes contacts understood the Wintel combination wanted the iPad down from 70 percent share, as it has had in the past, to under 50 percent by mid-2013. For Intel, Lenovo's strength in its native China would be a key factor.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini during a call discussing his company's latest results revealed that the first phone with one of its company's processors would at last be shipping this week. The executive didn't name the specific phone, but it may be the Lenovo K800, which had originally been promised for May. Other candidates could include the Orange Santa Clara or its near-identical cousin, the Lava Xolo X900.
ARM on Tuesday rolled out a unique variant on the Cortex-A15 designed to bring the next-generation chip to shelves faster and with less power use. A new hard macro variant that has fixed specifications, including quad cores clocked at 2GHz based on a 28 nanometer TSMC-made (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) design, instead of the "soft core" that lets firms heavily customize an ARM design to their own ends. In return, however, it's both faster to implement and uses the same power as the earlier Cortex-A9.
Intel's Developer Forum in Beijing has slipped out a new set of guidelines for Intel-based Windows 8 tablets. The chip designer wants tablets based on its Atom Z2760 chip to largely fit in with a 10-inch, touch-only tablet or a 11-inch version with a keyboard, CNET saw in its copy of the hardware advice. All of the dimensions would be targeted at matching or beating the iPad, with weight under 1.5 pounds, thicknesses below 0.35 inches, and over none hours of at least theoretical battery life.
A new rumor Monday has shown that Apple might be examining the effect of the A5X chip in an iPhone. The 9to5 claim has a version of the new iPad's chip was reportedly sitting in the existing iPhone 4S body as a test mule. The design, codenamed N96, reportedly has the same 1GB of RAM, although no mentions were made of what might be different.
More details of NVIDIA's Tegra 4 have emerged that could point to as much of a leap in speed as with the last generation. Possible leaks from VR-Zone have shown the line keeping the "4-plus-1" quad-core design but jumping to the much newer ARM Cortex-A15 architecture inside, which should give it a leap in speed at the same clock speed. The clock speeds themselves should climb from 1.5GHz to 2GHz to give it brute force improvements.
Mobile device chipmaker ARM on Tuesday revealed it has partnered with smart card maker Gemalto and German tech firm Giesecke & Devrient to boost smartphone and tablet security on platforms like Android. The idea is to help speed up the development of a security standard for all devices that takes hardware and software into account. The standard could be used by parties such as banks for secure wireless payments (such as Google Wallet) as well as studios and other providers of video-on-demand content.
Samsung's chip manufacturing plant in Austin has raised attention for hiring a significant number of long-time AMD staff who have focused primarily on servers. Newly transitioned Opteron VP Pat Patla, but also VP and Chief Engineer Jim Mergard and Senior Fellow Brad Burgess, have all left in the past year. The plant is already being run by Keith Hawkins (no direct link), who used to work at Sun.
French paper Les Echos has revealed that Sony will begin selling Google TV-powered hardware as early as September, marking the platform's debut overseas. Sony France marketing director Stephane Labrousse reportedly said the company will sell a set top box for about 200 euros (about $266) and a Blu-ray player that has Google TV integrated for 300 euros (about $400), both of which were on display at CES. The division lead went on to say the platform may also come to Spain, Germany, and the UK at the same time.
Qualcomm senior VP Rob Chandhok in discussion Friday made clear that the quad-core version of the Snapdragon S4 would be destined for Windows 8 notebooks. Confirming that ARM wouldn't be confined to tablets for Windows 8, Chandhok told IDG that he expected them to show up Intel's ultrabook concept with thinner designs and longer battery life. They would share the 28 nanometer process behind the dual-core versions, but the extra power would make them more viable for games and more complex apps as the software underwent an "maturation."
Apparent new leaks have hinted that NVIDIA's next-generation Tegra, for now called the Tegra 4, should be a generational leap. The future 28 nanometer chip was said by VR-Zone's tips to be getting GPGPU support to use its graphics core for boosting CUDA, OpenCL, and other general-purpose tasks. The simple addition would hint at a graphics core multiple generations newer than what's in the Tegra 3, which dates back to the 2006-era PlayStation 3.
BlueStacks' App Player was posted as a beta on Tuesday with significant expansion over the earlier alpha. The Android-on-Windows emulator's compatibility is now much wider and will recognize games like Angry Birds Space that would normally talk directly to an ARM chip. OS support is wider as well, expanding from just Windows 7 to either as far back as Windows XP or as recent as the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
Intel has managed to not only hold on to but widen its lead as the world's largest chip designer in the past year, iSuppli determined Monday. By revenue, Intel had seen its revenue in 2011 go up over 20 percent to $48.7 billion dollars despite the effect of the iPad and other tablets. ARM's champion, Samsung, had moved just over half a point to $28.6 billion.
A new discovery within Chromium OS bug tracking has suggested that Chrome OS is not only close to using ARM but may use one of its fastest processors. Thomas Taschauer has spotted numerous references to "Daisy," an unknown device that would use Samsung's Exynos 5250. The 2GHz, ARM Cortex-A15-based chip could both significantly improve battery life and thinness while making a Chrome OS device as fast or faster than current Intel Atom Chromebooks.
Intel through a combination of a Linux driver posting by its own engineer Jesse Barnes, as well as roadmap presentations by Advantech PPT 1, PPT 2), has given a peek at a major upgrade to the Atom platform due in early 2013. The processor, Valley View, would run on a Balboa Pier chipset and improve both the baseline performance as well as visuals. Chips would carry as many as four cores, and the graphics would be the same as in Ivy Bridge, giving about a fourfold improvement over the existing Cedar View and Cedar Trail platforms.
Microsoft's Windows 8 ARM tablet rollout has had a rough schedule possibly outlined in a rumor late Tuesday. Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo were said by Digitimes' part supplier contacts to be the ones hand-picked for the October release. The Nokia tablet might follow a month later, in November.
A slide leak Monday has unearthed more details about Samsung's Exynos 5250 than what it has shared so far. The SemiAccurate copy shows that the 2GHz, ARM Cortex-A15 performer should also be mated to a much newer Mali-T604 graphics core. With 2.1 gigapixels per second and a wide 12.8GBps memory bandwidth, the T604 should blow past the already fast Mali-400 in the Galaxy S II.
After having touted ARM support, Microsoft is expected to leave it a minority for the fall Windows 8 launch, insiders purportedly disclosed on Monday. There would be "fewer than five" ARM devices, three of which would be tablets, in the understanding of Bloomberg's sources. Over 40 companies were hoping to have Intel-based systems, they said.
India took quick action to address quality gripes with the original Aakash tablet by releasing an upgraded version. The new Android 2.2 model is still made by Datawind but is roughly twice as fast, carrying a 700MHz ARM Cortex-A8 chip. Its much-maligned resistive, seven-inch touchscreen has been replaced with a much more responsive capacitive screen.
(Update 2: more details) Following the new iPad's Australian launch, iFixit has been conducting a teardown of Apple's tablet. The early look so far validate rumors surrounding the design, proving that Samsung is the initial LCD supplier and that a different display connector sits inside that prevents simply swapping in an older screen. Even more so than before, the inside is dominated by the three-unit battery, with the mainboard just a fraction of the inside.
Nokia's design head Marko Ahtisaari confirmed in an interview [full content currently paper-only] that the company was developing a tablet. Without saying what it involved, he promised Kauppalehti Optio that it would be unique in a sea of would-be iPad rivals. The device was important enough that it was consuming a third of Ahtisaari's time.
Computer chipmaker ARM on Tuesday claimed that its new Cortex-M0+ processor is the world's most energy-efficient microprocessor. The 32-bit chip is said to consume just nine microamps for every 1MHz on its 90-nanometer, low-power architecture. This is about a third of the energy of any 8- or 16-bit processor on the market, ARM said, while also outperforming them.
Well-known for its pre-release Apple access, Vietnam's Tinhte in a pair of posts has gotten early access to the third-generation iPad and answered some of its core questions. Apart from proving that the box will be very familiar, the site confirmed that the new iPad has an LTE toggle to save power. Most Android devices often won't allow this without a third-party app or hack.
Intel is in the midst of developing its own online TV streaming service and hardware to match, leaks disclosed Monday. It would create a form of virtual TV that would sell access in cable- and satellite-style bundles, the Wall Street Journal understood. While possibly a white box service that would let others put their own badge on top, Intel would sometimes run under its own name.
Nokia's repeated hints of tablet plans might come to fruition if rumors circulating Monday are accurate. The Finnish firm was said by Digitimes' usual part supplier sources to be readying a 10-inch Windows 8 tablet using a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Compal would build the tablet, which wouldn't be in stores until late 2012 "at the earliest," the tipsters claimed.
NVIDIA responded to Apple's claims of performance for the new iPad. Representative Ken Brown told ZDNet that NVIDIA didn't have the benchmark criteria Apple used to claim a fourfold speed advantage over the Tegra 3 processor. As such, it couldn't verify the authenticity of the claims, which it implied might have been biased through the choice of apps.
Another rumor surfacing less than a day before Apple's next-generation iPad event may have filled in some of the in-between details of the future iPad and the Apple TV. While recapping most of the common beliefs, such as the 2048x1536 display and sped-up A5X dual-core chip, The Verge understood there would be more RAM. How much wasn't mentioned, although 1GB is most likely given Apple's tendency to double RAM and the need to hold large art assets in memory.
GlobalFoundries picked Monday to say it had bought out AMD's remaining stake in its manufacturing. The mutually agreed deal now puts the chip production firm entirely in the control of Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), the company that had originally orchestrated the split. GlobalFoundries could now act independently and wouldn't be bound to making AMD processor, although there were no immediate intentions to stop.
Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Forrest Norrod, general manager for Dell’s server solutions group hinted at the possiblity that an ARM-based server could be on the horizon. Norrod said Dell has had ARM systems in their lab "over a year," and said adding ARM processors to its lineup might be attractive to customers that with concerns about power consumption. He pointed out that Dell's lifecycle management system is independent of the CPU and fully capable of incorporating ARM processors.
Samsung is partnering with Qualcomm and ARM to offer digitally rights protected HD videos on mobile devices. The trio is matching Qualcomm's Snapdragon StudioAccess and ARM's TrustZone DRM technologies with Samsung's Media Hub app for smartphones and tablets. Separately, Samsung has released version 2.0 of its S Pen SDK.
Marvell helped kick off Mobile World Congress with a pair of important cellular chipsets and a new mobile processor to match. The PXA1802 is one of the first cellular chips that can talk both to a conventional 4G LTE base station as well as the TD-LTE used on China Mobile and some North American carriers, even up to LTE's peak 150Mbps speed. It can connect to TD-SCDMA for China Mobile smartphones, although Marvell told Electronista it could also be used for pure data on a hotspot or tablet.
Intel and Orange confirmed late rumors in the evening and previewed the Santa Clara, the first officially launching Intel-based phone. Built behind the scenes by Taiwan's Gigabyte, the phone we first saw at CES will run Intel's new 1.6GHz Medfield-based chip as well as Intel's 21Mbps HSPA 3G chipset from its recent acquisition target Infineon. While not a high-end phone, it should potentially outperform many others at a similar price.
Apple's A5X chip might still be joined by a full-fledged A6, based on an investigation of code. A deep dig by 9to5 into the iOS 5.1 beta code has shown both a more modest upgrade, the S5L8945X (possibly A5X), as well as a previously undiscovered S5L8950X. With the existing A5 known as the S5L8940X, it hints that Apple has been working on two chips at once for the first time.
TI has posted a demo video (below) of its OMAP5 processor in what could be a sign of how fast many next-generation processors will be next to even chips that have yet to arrive. Even clocked at just 800MHz with only two main cores, the use of ARM's new Cortex-A15 was able to run a web browser, MP3 playback, and downloading multitasking test more than twice as quickly as a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. While the A9 wasn't named, it was likely NVIDIA's 1.3GHz Tegra 3, showing how little clock speed mattered.
Computer chipmaker AMD will turn to Cyclos Semiconductor for its resonant clock mesh technology in its upcoming Piledriver-based chips. They will replace the Bulldozer-core chips introduced in the fall of 2011. The new technology will reduce the chip's clock distribution power.
Qualcomm on Tuesday unveiled what might be one of its most important cellular chipsets in its fifth-generation Gobi reference design. The new version is the first to support multiple bands of LTE on a single chipset, including both regular LTE and the TD-LTE being used in China and some North American carriers. The hardware also has 3G support for both HSPA+ and EVDO, making the chips true world-roaming devices.
An apparent discovery Sunday has shown what's purported as the iPad 3's mainboard with an unexpected A5X, not A6, processor name. The WeiPhone details don't directly indicate what this would imply, but they imply more of an evolution than a major overhaul. A date code on top suggests it was made in 2011 week 46, or about November 14-20 and the timeframe when iPad 3 production may have started.
AMD's recently departed graphics CTO Eric Demers is now thought to have jumped ship for Qualcomm. An insider connection talking to The Inquirer said the graphics expert had made the hop "under good terms," but partly in the view that Qualcomm wasn't seen as a direct competitor. Intel and NVIDIA may have tried to poach him in the past.
iFixit on Thursday posted a teardown of the just-launched PlayStation Vita that provided a handful of surprises about its construction. The gaming handheld is unusually easy to open, with standard (if small) Philips screws throughout, few adhesives, and a battery that's relatively easy to replace. Much of the design is modular, and even the screws are color-coded in a way that helps identify which screws belong to the mainboard itself versus the parts that attach to the mainboard.
Another AMD executive departure has fueled speculation Tuesday. Graphics division CTO Eric Demers is known to be exiting the chip designer as of February 17. Former Apple executive and current primary CTO Mark Papermaster would temporarily take over during his absence.
MediaTek has announced a new mobile chipset, the MT6575, that promises to bring Android 4.0 to entry-level smartphones. The hardware is based on a 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor, stepping up from the 650MHz chip of the previous-generation components that were utilized in Lenovo's A60 handset.
Microsoft's Windows leader Steven Sinofsky picked an interview this week to reveal that Windows 8 on ARM wouldn't support plugins. He explained to AllThingsD that Internet Explorer on these chips, even in the regular desktop, wouldn't run Flash or any similar browser add-ins. Mobile devices were moving away from Flash as a whole, he said.
