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ARM quarterly profits up 45% year/year

Posted by – January 31, 2012
Category: ARM

ARM just published their Q4 2011 numbers:

Q4 2011 – Financial Summary
Q4 2011 Q4 2010 % Change
Revenue ($m) 217.0 179.6 21%
Revenue (£m) 137.8 113.9 21%
Operating margin 48.2% 41.1%
Profit before tax (£m) 69.0 47.6 45%
Earnings per share (pence) 3.71 2.90 28%

Warren East, Chief Executive Officer, said:

“In Q4 and throughout 2011 ARM has seen strong licensing growth, driven by market-leading semiconductor companies increasing their commitment to ARM technology, and more new customers choosing ARM technology for the first time. We have also seen our royalty revenue continue to grow faster than industry revenues as the ARM Partnership gains share in our target markets.

2012 will bring exciting opportunities and challenges as ARM enters competitive new markets where we are well positioned to succeed with leading technology, an innovative business model and a thriving ecosystem of Partners. As our customers are designing more ARM technology into their widening product portfolios, ARM is investing in the development of new products. These products will drive further long-term growth in our revenues, profits and cash.”

Since I started this blog on January 1st 2010 (I was before video-blogging at TechVideoBlog.com since 2004), the ARM stock has gone up 343%.

NDS Snowflake Set-top-box user interface demo

Posted by – January 25, 2012

Using the AmLogic single-core ARM Cortex-A9 with Mali-400 graphics, here is a showcase of the NDS Snowflake Set-top-box user interface on top of Android. NDS recently won the TV Innovation Award for this ARM Powered Set-top-box user interface.

Fortrend capacitive touch panel modules

Posted by – January 25, 2012

Fortrend of Taiwan makes capacitive touch panels, here they are showing the different sizes and types up to 12.1″ dual-touch.

Lenovo SmartTV K91 55″ Android ICS TV

Posted by – January 25, 2012

Using the Qualcomm APQ8060 Dual-core 1.5Ghz processor, Lenovo is releasing the Ice Cream Sandwich 55″ HDTV in China.

UbiDuo by sComm, communication device for deaf and hard of hearing

Posted by – January 25, 2012

This ARM Powered device is for deaf and hard of hearing people to communicate with hearing people to interact with each other face-to-face.

Status of Ubuntu for ARM Laptops and Servers

Posted by – January 24, 2012

David Mandala, Manager of the ARM Team at Canonical talks about the status of Ubuntu Linux on ARM Laptops and Servers, and about their plans for Ubuntu on ARM until 2014 and beyond. Who wouldn’t want to buy an awesome $199 ARM Powered Ultrabook, 13.3″ screen, ARM Cortex-A9 1.5Ghz TI OMAP4460 or 1.8Ghz TI OMAP4470, thinner, lighter than Intel Ultrabooks, 2x longer battery life on a smaller thinner battery (10x with the sunlight readable Pixel Qi), 1GB or 2GB RAM for full speed Chrome and Firefox web browser speeds?

Talking about the status of Ubuntu on TI OMAP3 (beagleboard), OMAP4 (pandaboard), Marvell, Freescale, Calxeda, plans for Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 optimizations by Ubuntu 12.10, ARM Cortex-A15, ARM Cortex-A7, ARMv8 64bit, the imminent inclusion of full hard-float optimization in Ubuntu 12.4 on ARM:

With Ubuntu 12.04 on ARM there is also hard-float support (ARMhf), as previously talked about on Phoronix, and this will mean a huge performance boost for many workloads. Mandala said the performance boost they are seeing is between 5% and 30% improvement for floating-point operations. Also benefiting greatly for end-users is improved font-rendering, web-page scrolling, and other operations from this ARM hardfp support. Other code is also benefiting due to better use of the stack calling convention.

Source: phoronix.com

Orchard Inc Toughlet, Pixel Qi tablet for commercial ruggedized outdoor use

Posted by – January 24, 2012

Orchard Inc raised $4 Million for a tablet startup, here showing their titanium aluminium enclosure design, water resistant, unbreakable, with Pixel Qi and OMAP4 Powered Android, designed for outdoor use.

Tobii eye tracking demo

Posted by – January 24, 2012

Tobii shows their latest eye tracking technology in the form of a thick bunch of cameras and detectors to be placed under a screen, after calibration, it can detect where you are looking on the screen, providing a new type of user interface for computing. Do you think we’ll soon have this technology automatically-calibrated and into all computer screens, into all smartphones and tablets also?

Obigo Browser on TV, Smartphone, Tablet and more

Posted by – January 24, 2012

Obigo shows their web browser running on a smart TV, on a Smartphone, Tablet and more. Their software solution on Android also enables to customize home replacements for Android based on HTML5.

AQ Corporation NFC solutions

Posted by – January 24, 2012

AQ Corporation shows some of their latest NFC solutions for tablets, they sell tablets which stores can buy to receive NFC payments in store.

HuinTech touch panel mouse

Posted by – January 24, 2012

Huintech presents their latest RF based touchpointer device, to use for presentations, for putting mouse functions and certain controls in a remote.

Arnova 7c G2 sold for 80£ in the UK, 7″ capacitive unlocked 3G HSPA+ inside

Posted by – January 23, 2012

The new Archos Arnova 7c G2 has been released. It’s being sold for 80£ at Carphonewarehouse.com with an unlocked, no-contract 3G SIM card slot. It’s a 7″ 800×480 capacitive screen, the Qualcomm MSM7227 800Mhz ARM11 processor that can run Gingerbread now, ICS possibly soon, with the Adreno 200 graphics that supports most Android 3D games today.

This price is basically $99 without the 20% UK VAT tax. By far the cheapest 7″ capacitive 3G-enabled tablet.

Some other specs:
– 4GB internal storage, expandable with microSDHC cards
– Dimensions: 195 mm x 118 mm x 14.1 mm
– Weight: 490 g
– WiFi, Bluetooth, micro USB 2.0 slave port, microSD slot, front facing camera, G-sensor, microphone, built-in speaker, GPS

Lenovo IdeaTab S2110, Android ICS Qualcomm Krait MSM8960 Tablet with Keyboard Dock

Posted by – January 21, 2012

Lenovo showed a prototype of their next generation Android tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich on the 1.5Ghz Dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Krait processor and supporting a keyboard dock that looks similar to the Asus Transformer Prime.

A look inside of the Toshiba Portege Z835

Posted by – January 21, 2012
Category: Exclusive videos, CES

Toshiba shows a transparent version of their Toshiba Portege Z835 ultrabook to show some of the components that are inside.

Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone 7.5 at CES 2012

Posted by – January 21, 2012

The Nokia Lumia 900 has a 4.3″ 800×480 Clearblack AMOLED screen, runs on a single core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and runs on the 4G/LTE network. This is the new big marketing push at CES from Nokia and Microsoft, the Nokia Lumia 900 is already the third Nokia Windows Phone device after the 710 and 800.

iRiver Kibot, this robot takes care of children

Posted by – January 21, 2012

iRiver and the South Korean telecom company KT have introduced this robotic playmate for kids called Kibot. The price in South Korea is something like $40 plus a $30/month subscription contract with KT over 2 years which includes new educational apps and videos through the KT robot portal in South Korea. It’s based on Android and also comes with the full Google Marketplace. The pricing for it is about the same as an iPhone 4S. iRiver plans to do more robots, to take care of old people, and maybe at some point they’ll release an Android robot that cooks food, takes out trash and washes dishes. The Android robots are invading the world! So what do you think, should I start a new ARM Powered Robots category on my website?

Samsung 55″ Super OLED at CES 2012

Posted by – January 20, 2012

Now it seems that the 55″ OLED screens are ready to be shown publicly for the first time. I prefer 55″ or larger 4K LCD TVs though. If they can make the 55″ OLED TVs with 4K resolution and sell them below $2000 that would be great!

OMAP5 at CES 2012

Posted by – January 20, 2012

Texas Instruments was showing the OMAP5 ARM Cortex-A15 processor for the first time at CES 2012 running on their new development kit which they were showing to people but not allowing video recording of yet.

Engadget.com was the first to be allowed to film a demo of it:

Look forward to much more on the Texas Instruments OMAP5 platform at Mobile World Congress next month and in the months to come until devices start shipping using OMAP5 by the end of the year or early next year.

Windows RT on OMAP4470 Texas Instruments 1.5Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 Tablet

Posted by – January 20, 2012

Here’s Windows 8 on an ARM Powered Tablet, running on the Texas Instruments OMAP4470 1.8Ghz processor with the SGX544 GPU. This is the first time that I saw the OMAP4470 in a tablet and it’s the first time that I briefly touched Windows 8 on an ARM Powered tablet (as you can hear in the video, I wasn’t supposed to be allowed to touch it). Look forward to much more on OMAP4470 and Windows 8 on ARM in the months to come.

MHL at CES 2012

Posted by – January 20, 2012

Judy Chen, Director of Marketing at MHL presents the latest developments at the MHL Consortium, the latest list of devices to support the new standard. It looks like most new high-end phones, HDTVs and new types of devices are using the MHL connector and are part of the MHL Consortium, the reason being having everything go through one Micro-USB connector on the side of devices makes them simpler, thinner, cheaper to manufacture.