arm

Samsung announces quad-core chip for Galaxy S phone

Electronics heavyweight Samsung will put quad-core silicon in its next Galaxy smartphone, upping the ante for mobile performance.

The Exynos 4 Quad integrates four processor cores and is built on the company's cutting-edge 32-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip will run at speeds above 1.4GHz, the company said in a statement today.

As a yardstick, the third-generation iPad uses older 45-nanometer Samsung manufacturing tech and its central processing unit is dual-core (though the graphics processing unit is quad-core). And most multi-core smartphones and tablets on the market today are dual-core.

Samsung's new chip -- targeted at both tablets … Read more

Qualcomm chip in HTC One S is speed demon, says analyst

Qualcomm is proving that a phone doesn't have to be quad-core to be fast.

"Scoring 25 percent higher than its older siblings...in [central processing unit] performance benchmarks, shows Qualcomm has delivered on its promise for higher performance CPU," Jim Mielke, vice president of engineering at ABI Research, said in a note today, referring to the HTC One S.

That phone comes with the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) operating system.

The HTC smartphone taps the first Qualcomm 28-nanometer (nm) chip -- the "Snapdragon" MSM8260A. That's a big step up in chip … Read more

Go ahead, bring your Windows 8 gadgets to work, says Microsoft

Windows 8 running on small devices using chips from Qualcomm, Nvidia, and others is not just a consumer play, as Microsoft made clear in a post this week.

In a blog posted Thursday, "Managing 'BYO' PCs in the enterprise (including WOA)", Mircrosoft's Jeffrey Sutherland, a program manager lead in the company's Management Systems group, addresses the "drive towards consumerization of IT" and how consumer technology is "bleeding into business organizations." In short, employees are bringing their personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones to work rather than using the devices assigned to them by … Read more

Windows 8 RT to bring eclectic mix of PCs

Microsoft affirmed today that Windows running on power-efficient chips from ARM will yield smaller, lighter devices. Not unlike Intel's goal for ultrabooks.

As of today, Windows on ARM is officially called Windows RT, or Windows Runtime -- which essentially refers to the Metro part of Windows 8.

Main points of today's Microsoft Windows RT announcement:

Pre-installed only: "This single edition will only be available pre-installed on PCs and tablets powered by ARM processors and will help enable new thin and lightweight form factors with impressive battery life." Touch-optimized Office: "Windows RT will include touch-optimized desktop … Read more

Windows PCs to decline as Android, Apple devices rise

The venerable Windows-Intel PC will see a sharp decline by 2016 while devices running Android and Apple's iOS are on the rise, market researcher IDC said today.

There will be a "dramatic shift" between 2011 and 2016, with the "once-dominant" Windows-Intel (aka, x86) PCs dropping from a market-dominating 35.9 percent share in 2011 to 25.1 percent in 2016," IDC said.

Mobile devices like Android phones and tablets and Apple iPhones and iPads will step into the void and begin to dominate. Android devices (using ARM chips) will grow from 29.4 percent … Read more

Latest BlueStacks ARMs your PC

The BlueStacks app player for running Android apps on Windows has taken a major step forward today with the release of its first beta, which can run even graphics-intensive Android apps on desktop PCs.

The BlueStacks beta (download) leverages a new, patent-pending technology that the company has developed called LayerCake, which does two things necessary for running Android apps on Windows. First, it powers the app on hardware that it wasn't originally intended to run on. That's basically the ARM to x86 conversion which runs the apps, and it comes with the blessing of one of AMD's … Read more

Nvidia's Haas on being two places at once: Intel and ARM

Nvidia mobile chief Rene Haas laid out in an interview with CNET some of the device choices Windows 8 shoppers may face this fall. Inside some, Nvidia snuggles up next to Intel. In others, Nvidia and Intel are worlds apart.

Nvidia is in a unique position because it offers chips that land in devices in two giant markets: Windows-Intel and ARM--the latter's chip designs power virtually every smartphone and tablet on the planet.

For Windows-Intel, Nvidia's mobile focus is laptops. There, Nvidia will supply its latest power-efficient graphics processing units (GPUs), the 640M and 620M--formally announced today … Read more

Windows 8 reportedly set for October debut

Microsoft reportedly will finish work on Windows 8 by summer, setting the stage to release the next version of its flagship operating system sometime around October.

Bloomberg, citing "people with knowledge of the schedule," also reports that there will be fewer than five devices running the ARM system-on-a-chip architecture at launch. Those ARM chips allow for thinner, lighter tablet devices, something that Microsoft hopes will help it cut into Apple's iPad's huge lead in the tablet market. The Cupertino rival just disclosed that it sold more than 3 million of its latest iPad since the third-generation … Read more

ARM looks to refrigerators, medical devices with new chip

With the smartphone and tablet markets firmly in its grasps, ARM Holdings is looking elsewhere to capitalize on its growth.

The chip designer yesterday announced its new ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. The chip is designed for intelligent sensors and smart control systems in a host of markets, including home appliances, medical monitoring, and motor-control devices.

The secret to the Cortex-M0+'s market appeal is its energy-efficiency, ARM says. The company is calling the chip "the world's most energy-efficient microprocessor," consuming just one-third of the energy of any 8- or 16-bit processor. However, ARM claims the processor can deliver … Read more