Category: Chip provider

Were there Android Tablets at GoogleI/O?

Posted by Charbax – May 21, 2010
Category: Tablets, Nvidia, Android

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
Category: Nvidia, Android

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
Category: Smartphones, Set-top-boxes, Software, Exclusive videos, ST-Ericsson, MWC

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
Category: Servers, Marvell

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
Category: Samsung

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
Category: Tablets, Development Boards, Samsung, Android

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
Category: Tablets, Nvidia, Android

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

Dell Thunder, 4.1″ WVGA OLED Android phone

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010
Category: Smartphones, Qualcomm, Android

Dell is announcing (or leaking) this 4.1″ WVGA OLED based (probably Super AMOLED), to run Android 2.1, AT&T and worldwide HSDPA versions to be released this year also with Dell’s proprietary “Stage UI” overlay user interface.

Source: engadget.com

Dell Flash, 3.5″ WVGA Android Froyo phone

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010
Category: Smartphones, Qualcomm, Android

Here’s another new Android phone announced (or leaked) by Dell, to use the Qualcomm MSM7230 800mhz processor, 14.4Mbps download and 5.6Mbps upload HSPA, 512MB RAM, TV-out, Bluetooth 3.0 in this “curved glass” design. Dell is designing some kind of “Stage UI”, similar to HTC’s own Sense UI for their customized Android home screen and user interfaces.

Source: engadget.com

Dell Smoke, Android based Blackberry-like phone

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010
Category: Smartphones, Qualcomm, Android

Here’s a design for an Android phone by Dell to be released next year, it will be based on the next generation Qualcomm MSM7230 processor, come with a 2.8″ QVGA screen, 14.4Mbps HSPA and is said that it will be sold for cheap.

Source: engadget.com

$104 Eken 8-inch Android Tablet

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010
Category: Tablets, VIA, Android

Here’s another Android tablet presented by Eken at the China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong. It runs a 600mhz VIA ARM Processor, USB-host, SD card slot, the 3G-module is optional.

Source: shanzai.com

Hott MD700 Android Tablet

Posted by Charbax – April 21, 2010
Category: Tablets, Rockchip, Android

So you might have seen my video of the Hott MD500 that I posted from CeBIT here last month. Hott is now showing the 7″ Android tablet called the MD700 at the China Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong. The price in bulk is said to be probably around $130 USD.

Source: shanzai.com

I would have liked to video-blog at Hong Kong and Shenzhen fairs

Posted by Charbax – April 16, 2010
Category: Opinions, VIA, Archos, Google

Hong Kong Trade Development Council Logo
Image via Wikipedia

The Hong Kong Electronics and Sourcing fairs and the China Consumer Electronics Fair were just held in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. I had tried for 3 weeks after CeBIT to find a sponsor to cover my flight and hotel costs so that I could go there and bring you 50 videos of all the new products that I expected to be shown there. But I did not succeed to convince any sponsor for going to film in Asia this time, so I am for now staying in Copenhagen where I am currently filming some interviews at the Cphpix Copenhagen Film Festival: 1, 2, 3.

I’ve then been trying to find other sites covering those trade fairs with video, pictures and infos, but I have not found much thus far. Google News has some things about CCEF and about HKTDC in Chinese, clonedinchina.com has a few posts showing such things as a new Rockhip powered Android phone, SmartDevices R7, Onda VX560 7-inch PMP, Kinstone Windows CE MID, Huawei C8600 Android phone, MDO Avatar G580 Android phone, lots of cheaper ipad-like tablets.

I don’t know for sure how much innovation and new products were shown by the Chinese manufacturers at these Trade Shows these past few days. I didn’t yet spend enough time translating all the Chinese blogs and searching more for those most interesting Android tablets, new cheaper Android phones, new interesting e-readers, ARM Powered Laptops and more.

I guess also that this year’s CCEF, HKTDC and HK Spring Sourcing fairs may not have been too popular among those European and US based bloggers that I know. Maybe they don’t go there for a reason.

Anyways, I will try to bring you exclusive videos of a bunch of awesome ARM Powered products that I have right here to review, I’ve got a $95 10″ Android VIA-ARM Powered laptop (watch me showing a brief preview of it in the video below), I’ve got an Intelligent Mobile Hotspot Mifi adapter by Novatel Wireless, I’ve got the touch-screen PocketBook 302 with WiFi/Bluetooth and I’ve also got a Bluetooth wireless foldable keyboard by Chinfai Leicke. I’ll post extensive video reviews of those and more as soon as I find the time.

This video was posted at: netbooknews.com

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brightsideofnews.com: Banchmark comparisons of ARM Cortex A8 against Intel Atom N450

Posted by Charbax – April 14, 2010
Category: Freescale, Intel, Ubuntu

At about 3x lower power consumption, much lower heat dissipation and much lower overall system pricing, the Freescale i.MX515 platform in a development board developed by Pegatron, is used for benchmarks of all kinds of performance areas by processor benchmarking expert Van Smith at this 9-page benchmarking article at brightsideofnews.com

While this specific ARM Cortex A8 implementation performs great on integers, power consumption, heat dissipation, price, floating-point performance still needs some improvement with ARM Cortex designs to come. Consider also that Ubuntu 9.04 used in this test is only the first implementation of Ubuntu for ARM Cortex and that Ubuntu 10.4 which is imminently going to be released will significantly improve ARM performance of those benchmarks.

The ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz.

I guess it’s not yet possible for Van Smith in this test to make an apples to apples comparison as the current ARM Cortex A8 are still oriented at Smart Phones and thin and light Tablets rather than full SmartBooks for full desktop-like performance requirements of the more desktop-performance oriented next generation ARM Cortex designs.

The goal for ARM when reaching the markets of Laptop and Desktop form factors is to reach the level of performance required to run full high resolution Web Browsers at full speed, where the OS with the browser boots instantly, with fast enough RAM where unlimited tabs open instantly, where hardware acceleration of embedded videos functions smoothly and where even the Native Client and 3D features run fully within the ARM Powered Web Browser. Once that level of performance is reached, further performance improvements will be less important than lowering the power consumption and lowering the cost of the next processors. Once everything most users need to have processed on their devices seem to run instantly, reaching the instant browser performance level, why would anyone want to increase the performance of client device oriented processors further?

You can find the benchmarks at: brightsideofnews.com

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GlobalFoundries (AMD spin-off) to make 28nm ARM Cortex A9 designs

Posted by Charbax – April 14, 2010
Category: GlobalFoundries, AMD, ARM

Image representing AMD as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

AMD spin-off called GlobalFoundries is looking to make one of the fastest ARM Cortex A9 implementations as a 28nm process size, using High-K Metal Gate instead of the Silicon Dioxide Gate of previous processors. This allows for smaller and even faster processors.

The implementation of high-κ gate dielectrics is one of several strategies developed to allow further miniaturization of microelectronic components, colloquially referred to as extending Moore’s Law.

My question would be like this: Does this basically mean that AMD investors are investing heavily in designing ARM processors instead of X86?

AMD spin-off is going ARM, Nvidia is going ARM, VIA is going ARM, that may leave Intel a bit alone with the X86.

Source: brightsideofnews.com

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Archos Generation 8 Android Tablets, prices and sizes rumored

Posted by Charbax – April 12, 2010
Category: Tablets, PMPs, Texas Instruments, Archos, Android

The prices are said to be $100 to $350, the sizes 3″ to 10″, ARM Cortex processor from 800mhz to 1ghz, with multi-touch and 3D acceleration.

My guesses are, based on this slide presented by Henri Crohas in China:

2x Archos 3 Android Gen8: starting at $100, what would the second 3″ model be about?
1x Archos 5 Android Gen8: starting at $200?
2x Archos 7 Android Gen8: $200-300? Why two 7″ models?
1x Archos 10 Android Gen8: $350? Pixel Qi dual-mode screen (my huge wish, so it can be readable for e-books and run 50h on the battery)?

The slide mentions multi-touch, a big question would be, does Archos now use Capacitive touch-screens? The the case of 3″ and 7″, might it be that the second skew is to provide a cheap resistive choice as well as a $50 to $100 more expensive capacitive type? The thing about capacitive screen is this, as far as I understand, and as far as one can find by just looking at what’s available on the market, it might be capacitive screens are really much more expensive and hard to come by in sizes other than some very definite sizes decided to be mass manufactured by the smart phone industry.

OpenGL acceleration and multi-touch features are clearly stated in the slide. Which may mean that Android 2.1 support is pretty much for surely available. Another hardware feature would be interesting to know about would be how well those devices will integrate 3G connectivity. We know Archos does Bluetooth tethering well, and one can buy a Mifi for WiFi to 3G tethering, how about Archos building 3G modems directly into skews of those Android tablet devices, and how about them making sure that power is managed in a way so that Voice-over-IP and other instant messaging over IP applications can constantly be active and stand-by on 3G and WiFi connections.

Logically to reach 1ghz they will use the Texas Instruments OMAP3640 series of processors, which is a significant upgrade on OMAP3440 of the current generation. This is not only a matter of increase of mhz speed. OMAP3640 is built on a 45nm process instead of the 65nm process of the current processor, which means the processor is significantly smaller and uses a lot less power, which probably brings better battery runtime. You can watch my video comparing OMAP3630 with OMAP3430. The performance increase for 3D rendering with the new processor is more than 62% going from 92fps to 156fps on the same 3D rendering animation. I don’t know if video decoding and encoding performance has been improved. And I don’t know how much things like website rendering is improved, if it’s just 25% faster based on 800mhz vs 1ghz or if it is more than that.

I do not know if OMAP3640 can do 1080p decoding and much higher HD video decoding bitrates. I don’t know if OMAP3640 simplifies the integration of mini-HDMI output directly into the device. If Archos includes a camera, it could probably record 720p video which would be really awesome, if a wireless microphone using Bluetooth or mini-jack input also can be used for good sound recording.

You can discuss this news in the forum: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=32392

Source: p5w.net
Found via: archoslounge.net

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Sharp IS01, Android 5″ 960×480 capacitive pocketable

Posted by Charbax – March 31, 2010
Category: Tablets, Laptops, Qualcomm, Android

About 6 months after Sharp’s introduction of the Freescale i.MX51 powered PC-Z1 running Ubuntu on the Japanese market, Sharp is now announcing this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered 3G-enabled Android powered device to be released in June to the Japanese market.

Watch also an augmented reality application runing on the Sharp IS01 in this other video interview with a Sharp representative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHXv8ob7jNQ

Here are the specs:
– Qualcomm Snapdragon processor
– Android 1.6 for now
– 5″ touchscreen with a 960×480 resolution featuring Sharp’s “New Mobile ASV” multi-touch capacitive display
– Dual camera with one of 5.27Mpix and one front facing of only 0.43Mpix
– Full QWERTY keyboard with a 11.2mm key pitch
– 1Seg TV tuner (Japanese mobile QVGA 220-320 kbit/s terrestrial TV broadcast standard)
– WiFi
– IRDA
– Aquos Blu-Ray transport allowing you to rip Blu-Ray movies directly
– Bluetooth
– FM Transmitter
– 4GB of internal memory(3GB available for data usage)
– MicroSD slot
– 3G connection using AU CDMA (Japanese CDMA 3G carrier)
– Weight 227g
– Size 83×149×17.9mm

A developer version called JN-DK01 will be available in Japan starting in May.

Source: en.akihabaranews.com

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Beautiful OLPC Documentary film (45min) aired on Arte TV channel

Posted by Charbax – March 23, 2010
Category: Laptops, VIA, OLPC

This is a 45min Documentary film Directed by Chiara Sambuchi, produced by ZDF/Arte released by Lavafilm, just aired on the Arte TV channel in France and Germany. I have seen most of the OLPC related videos and documentary films during these past 4 years that I have been updating my video-blog at http://olpc.tv, this may be one of the best, most awesome and most beautiful Documentary films on the OLPC project that has yet been made.

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HTC Supersonic (HTC EVO 4G) WiMax Android phone

Posted by Charbax – March 23, 2010
Category: Smartphones, Qualcomm, Android

I filmed the Windows Mobile based HTC HD2 last month at the Mobile World Congress:
http://138.2.152.197/2010/02/17/htc-hd2-at-mobile-world-congress-2010/
And at the HTC booth at asked the HTC representative if there would be a 4.3″ LCD screen based Android phone as well, I didn’t get an answer on that at that point:
http://138.2.152.197/2010/03/01/htc-desire-htc-legend-and-htc-hd2-mini-at-mobile-world-congress-2010/

The HTC Supersonic is basically the same hardware as the HTC HD2, but this time it runs Android, comes perhaps with slight hardware changes such as a slightly larger battery (people might have been complaining about battery runtime on the HD2), it has a HDMI output when using an adaptor for that, 720p video recording and the 1ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Very interestingly, this is the first WiMax phone released by Sprint in the USA. That requires a whole new Mobile WiMax network and only some carriers are deploying that in some places. Though I have been covering WiMax for years such as in these interviews that I filmed at CeBIT 2006:
http://techvideoblog.com/cebit/wimax-forum/
http://techvideoblog.com/cebit/runcom/

So perhaps now finally some things may be happening on the Mobile WiMax front. My question is still, how much better is WiMax in terms of bandwidth capacity per user, bandwidth capacity with many mobile users. What is the performance of Mobile WiMax compared to 700mhz unlicenced wireless mobile networking over White Spaces or how does it compare with 3G HSDPA and LTE technology?

This video was released at: slashgear.com

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Samsung Galaxy S, 4″ Super AMOLED Android phone

Posted by Charbax – March 23, 2010
Category: Smartphones, Displays, Samsung, Android

I filmed some Super AMOLED videos last month at the Mobile World Congress:
http://138.2.152.197/2010/02/17/samsung-beam-android-phone-projector-at-mobile-world-congress-2010/
http://138.2.152.197/2010/02/15/samsung-super-amoled-screen-technology/

Super AMOLED is spectacular, that’s for sure. Blacks are incredibly black and vivid colors and brightness is super. The Super AMOLED is officially 20% birghter and reflects 80% less light than the first generation AMOLED screens, it removes some kind of layer that was covering the screen so devices can be thinner and the angle of vision is incredible.

Yet, my question is how much more does Super AMOLED cost compared to LCD, especially at sizes larger than 4″ in diagonal. I guess this is a matter of Samsung having invested huge amounts of billions of dollars into developing the AMOLED technology, that they have to try to mass manufacture those screens in quantities of millions for them to get down in cost. I wonder though, what is the difference in cost between AMOLED and LCD in those screen sizes? Anyone who knows the bill of material, please post in the comments.

I probably don’t really like Samsung’s attempt at making a different UI layer on top of Android which they call “S Life UI”. With the bit that I played with it on the Samsung Beam, I would probably prefer to disable that and somehow enable a normal standard Google Experience user interface.

This video was released at: IntoMobile.com

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