Category: Chip provider

Quake 3 on Freescale i.MX51

Posted by Charbax – May 25, 2010

Freescale is demonstrating Quake 3 on Android 2.1 running on their ARM Cortex A8 Freescale i.MX51 processor platform. It seems to run pretty smoothly with a decent frame rate outputted on this 800×480 medium density screen. This degree of success in 3D hardware acceleration for advanced 3D games on ARM devices with Android, as well as the achievements by the Unreal Engine group (watch my video Interview with Unreal Engine founder of Epic Games talking about Unreal Engine on Android), can give us a pretty good idea of how extremely advanced and fun 3D gaming can quickly become on these new Android devices.

Realize this, Quake 3 and even Unreal Tournament is running smoothly on our pocketable ARM Powered devices!

OpenVG hardware acceleration by Freescale

Posted by Charbax – May 25, 2010

You may be familiar with OpenGL hardware acceleration in all the recent ARM Processors, but check this recent API from the Khronos group: OpenVG. It is meant at rendering Vector Graphics, where basically the images are stored not in bitmaps (a sum of pixels) but in maths formulaes. Each time you need to re-draw the image, you just have to re-calculate the vectors to show high quality pictures and animations. This is what pdf and postscripts use, and this is especially useful for zooming. All cool user interfaces should use OpenVG at some point, which is easier and more flexible than OpenGL thus for certain graphics and animations to be used in all kinds of user interfaces as well as content.

So far, most processors could support OpenVG on top of the OpenGL hardware accelerator. But Freescale added a second GPU in its i.MX processors. So for instance their i.MX51 has a GPU for OpenGL and a second GPU for OpenVG.

carrypad.com: Compaq Airlife 100 video-review

Posted by Charbax – May 25, 2010

You may have seen my previous videos of the HP Compaq Airlife 100 as I filmed it at consumer electronics trade shows these past few months at CES and at Mobile World Congress.

Carrypad.com has got one from HP Spain and have posted this video review.

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Were there Android Tablets at GoogleI/O?

Posted by Charbax – May 21, 2010

I was expecting Google to launch Android Tablet Edition at the recent Google I/O, but watching through the two keynotes videos (1, 2), I can only see lots interesting things about WebM open-source free licence VP8 video codec launch, awesome new Android 2.2 features and Google TV launch, but no mention of them bringing their Android Martketplace to tablets.

NetbookNews.com did find a Nvidia Tegra 2 based new Android tablet showcased, but no talk or confirmation on if it will come with the Google Marketplace officially pre-installed:


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Nvidia to power Android 3 (Gingerbread?)

Posted by Charbax – May 15, 2010

In a conference call reported by theinquirer.net, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia talks about following things:

Jen-Hsun knows where the competition will come from, but added that Tegra plus Android 3 will prove to be a winning formula. “Prior to Tegra, there are only two application processor companies out in the mobile space, right? Basically, it’s Qualcomm and TI, and they both make wonderful application processors,” he said.

“Our differentiation and our contribution to the space is where multimedia, high resolution snappy graphics [are] really necessary. And the first-generation smartphones had pretty low resolution displays. And so snappy graphics and high-performance multimedia and high resolution just wasn’t as much of an issue. But [now] resolution’s a huge issue. And so that’s our contribution and that’s our differentiation and that’s what people are seeking out in the market.”

That may mean Android 3 is being optimized for ARM Cortex A9 grade processors. Taking advantage of dual-core and quad-core high performance processing and especially of the much increased graphics and video processing features of these next generation ARM processors. Thus the optimizations of the OS code may look like this:

Android 1 = ARM9 and ARM11
Android 2 = ARM Cortex A8
Android 3 = ARM Cortex A9

Animated backgrounds, fancier 3D UIs are nice and all, but I wonder if those might be bloat. I’d rather the video processing and graphics performance stick to when users launch camcorder, video playback, animations or 3D games applications. Having the most advanced camcorder and console-quality gaming in our next pocketable devices, absolutely, why not. If the next generation web browsers can output 100% smooth Chrome browsers, possibly assisted by powerful graphics hardware acceleration, using a 720p HDMI output to a HDTV, for a full screen instant web browsing experience, full javascripts and flash support, then even better.

Qt development framework demonstrated

Posted by Charbax – May 15, 2010

Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework for developing once, and deploying across lots of embedded Linux platforms, Windows CE, Symbian and Maemo without rewriting the source code. At Mobile World Congress, Qt was demonstrating their solution used in many different devices.

Qt Quick (Qt User Interface Creation Kit) is a high-level user interface technology that makes it dramatically easier for UI designers and developers with scripting language skills to quickly and easily create beautiful, pixel perfect UIs and lightweight, touch-enabled apps with Qt – all without requiring any C++ skills. It will be part of the Qt 4.7 release, which has had its first technology preview released in March.

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ARM in servers

Posted by Charbax – May 12, 2010

Marvell is announcing the plan to offer 40-nm multicore ARM processors in servers. This is big news. It means ARM may not only power all phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops, TVs and desktops of the future, it may also power the cloud computing that serves all those devices.

In terms of price, there is a huge gap between Intel’s Xeon chips some of which sell for several hundred dollars and the typical multicore ARM chip that may sell for about $35. That gives Marvell plenty of room to carve out its own profits.

The new chips will offer more than a five-fold reduction in power consumption compared to x86 processors that dominate the server market, Marvell claims.

Marvell and ARM are working with “multiple Tier 1 companies” to build larger trial deployments to validate ARM as a server platform.

partners are working on ports to ARM of x86 virtualization software also strategic for the server market.

Source: Eetimes.com

Google could be one of the “tier one companies building larger server deployments to validate ARM as a server platform”. Torben Mogensen speculates:

I think Cortex A9 multicore would be fine for its purpose. But they may design their own chip built around this core. Server chips won’t need the graphics and signal processors that most high-performance ARM chips have (as the latter are targeted at media applications), but may need larger caches and MMUs capable of addressing more than 4GB of physical memory. Even if ARM has only 4GB logical address space, you can let different processes have different 4GB chunks of a larger physical memory.
But, instead of designing their own, Google may just ask Marvell, Qualcom, Nvidia or TI to design a chip to their specifications. If Google promises to buy a million chips per year, I’m sure these companies would be quite happy to do so.

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Samsung is preparing ARM Cortex A9 dual core processors

Posted by Charbax – April 23, 2010

ARMnews has leaked some a slideshow document featuring Samsung’s roadmap for ARM Cortex A8, A9, single, dual and quad core processors to be released.

Found via: engadget.com

Hard Kernel Odroid-T, 10″ Capacitive Android Tablet

Posted by Charbax – April 23, 2010

Hard Kernel already has a 3.5″ gaming-oriented device which I filmed a couple of months ago (see here), now they are also announcing a 10″ tablet device named ODROID-T.

Here are the full specs:

Samsung S5PC110 Cortex-A8 1Ghz with 512KB L2 cache
3D Accelerator SGX540(up to 20M triangles/s and 1000M pixels/s)
512MB Mobile DDR 400Mega data rate

10.1inch 1366 x 768 LVDS interface(capacitive touch)
1080p video playback via HDMI cable

WiFi/Bluetooth
USB2.0 Host

Accelerometer
Android2.1

External GPS

Availability for worldwide shipping : Early June

Find more information at hardkernel.com

Dell is making a 7-inch WVGA Tegra 2 Android tablet

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010

Today’s Dell Android product leaks continue with this 7-inch Android tablet design powered by the ARM Cortex A9 based Nvidia Tegra2 processor! It’ll also have an optional DVB-T and ATSC TV tuner module. 1.3 megapixel camera and an SDHC card slot.

Source: engadget.com