Nvidia aims for quad-core, Kal-El tablets at $199

At CES 2012, Nvidia and Asus demo’d a $249 Kal-El quad-core tablet dubbed the Asus ME370T. Neither company has talked about that specific product since, but Nvidia is now showing off its quad-core “Kai” reference platform — and it’s identical to the Asus device it showcased earlier this year.

What’s new about Kai is the price, down to $199 from $249. According to Nvidia VP Rob Csongor, the company is putting together a two-pronged strategy between Android ICS at the low end, with Windows RT anchoring high end products. Speaking at the company’s investor meeting, Congor said: “Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point… So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.”

What sort of secret sauce? We suspect Nvidia’s DirectTouch will make an appearance. As we’vepreviously discussed, DirectTouch is a technology that integrates the functions of discrete chips into the Tegra processor and handles touch computation on the Companion Core.

Nvidia claims that DT offers improved power consumption as well as better fidelity, and while touch sensors aren’t known for high power usage, they require independent circuitry and typically operate in an “Always On” mode, even when the device is in standby. Improved integration and lower power consumption are two factors vitally important to pushing the cutting edge of low-cost design; DT offers advantages on both fronts.

Nvidia’s decision to build a reference platform isn’t surprising; the company has done something similar for GPUs for years. The $199 price point, however, could definitely shake things up. Amazon’sKindle Fire has an estimated Bill of Materials (BOM) between $150 and $199, and Kindle Fire sales have been high enough for the company to leverage economies of scale. Tegra 3 is significantly more powerful than the dual-core OMAP 4430 that powers the Fire, and unlike Amazon, the OEMs that might build such tablets don’t have anything like Amazon’s multimedia storehouse. If Nvidia can offer a reference design that still preserves some room for an actual profit, that’s a significant feat.

Source

Samsung unveils quad-core Exynos 4 SoC for Galaxy S3

Samsung has launched a new quad-core, 32nm HKMG processor today that it intends to showcase as part of the Galaxy S3, which will be officially launched next week. The new chip contains up to four Cortex-A9 cores running at 1.4GHz. It’s the first Exynos to utilize per-core scaling and voltage adjustments — previous devices, including Nvidia’s own Tegra 3, have eschewed individual core clock-gating (NV has claimed this actually reduced power by avoiding the need to implement power-hungry traces and gates).

According to Samsung, the new quad chip is capable of higher performance and lower power consumption than any of its 45nm cousins; the company hasn’t stated what GPU powers the device but its rumored to be a quad-core version of the Mali-400 that was used in the Galaxy S2.

Whether or not customers will be able to make effective use of a quad-core device, or whether we’ll see the Exynos 4412 squeezing into phones instead of tablets remain open questions. The shift to 32nm and the addition of clock gating and independent voltages should give the 4412 a power profile similar to Samsung’s older dual cores. Software optimizations remain an open question — if code isn’t written properly, the extra cores simply won’t be used enough to make a significant difference.

Samsung isn’t giving much detail in the way of ancillary specs, but the company has demoed a video of the 4412 powering a WQXGA (2560×1600) display (embedded below). That’s significantly higher than the iPad 3′s 2048×1536 and could be interpreted as a sign that the company plans to outspec the iPad with upcoming new tablets of its own. Candidly, we’re not sure that’s the best way to go about beating Apple. Many of the tablets that launched after the original iPad offered superior screen resolutions, WiFi speeds, 3D performance, or HSPA+ capabilities that Apple’s first-gen tablet lacked — and they all crashed and burned, nearly without exception. It’s been the low-cost Android tablets like the Kindle Fire that’ve gained the most traction with users, and they’ve done it by competing at significantly lower prices.

Texas Instruments is still on track to release an OMAP5 SoC later this year; that chip will be built around a dual-core Cortex-A15 chip also built on 32nm. We expect the Cortex-A9 quad-core will offer an overall performance boost compared to what Samsung currently has on the market, but those wanting to buy devices at the cutting-edge of the technology curve would be well advised to wait for A15 powered equipment — or grab a device powered by Qualcomm’s Krait SoC.

Why Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 has the competition on the defensive

After months of teasing and hinting, Qualcomm has finally taken the wraps off of its new Snapdragon S4 mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC). The MSM8960, featuring the Krait core, is the first ARM chip in the company’s stable of next generation mobile parts, and it’s got some official benchmark numbers that are sure to impress. Perhaps most importantly, the new Snapdragon is pulling off these striking feats of computational might with just two cores as other manufacturers are working toward four.

Qualcomm, unlike most ARM chip makers, does not license the architecture for its application processors directly from ARM Holdings. Instead, it designs its own cores in-house and simply licenses the ARM instruction set. At the most basic level, Qualcomm’s Krait core is more advanced than Cortex-A9, the current standard from ARM, and it may even best the next-generation Cortex-A15 core.

Snapdragon S4 is going to be significant the next time you’re shopping for a device for several reasons, not least among them the raw speed. With two 1.5GHz Krait cores, Qualcomm’s new part was able to thoroughly thrash dual-core ARM chips in most tests, and even beat Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core SoC in benchmarks that don’t rely heavily on multi-core optimization. A device running on this new breed of Snapdragon will have much more power to play with and lower power consumption thanks to a 28nm manufacturing process. Other ARM SoCs are still at 40nm.

Snapdragon S4 is also going to support a wide array of hardware on the chip itself. It has always been Qualcomm’s policy to integrate the cellular modem with the SoC, whereas other manufacturers rely on external components for that. The S4 will support on-die LTE, HSPA+, and CDMA radios — making it the first ever SoC to integrate LTE radio, and also the first 28nm LTE part. That meanslonger lasting, thinner, lighter devices.

Video and gaming performance might be the one stumbling block for the first run of S4 chips. Qualcomm opted not to wait for the Adreno 3xx GPUs to be ready for use, so the MSM8960 uses the Adreno 225, which is close in performance to other GPUs currently on the market. The 225 does add dual-channel video memory and a unified shader architecture, but the real magic will come when future S4 chips ship with Adreno 305.

Real world battery life claims will have to wait to be settled as the development platform Qualcomm is handing out is not tuned for battery performance. Each manufacturer thinks it’s on the right track, though. Snapdragons are capable of dynamically altering the clock speed of each core individually to respond to system demands. Qualcomm says this leads to better battery life in most situations. Nvidia says its system of switching cores completely off when not needed, and running a low-power companion core is better.

If anything is made clear by these first Snapdragon S4 tests, it’s that you should not only be concerned with the number of cores. That makes little more sense than the gigahertz race years ago. A chip’s features and architecture can make the user experience better regardless of the number of cores. Nvidia might have thought getting to quad-core first assured it victory, but Qualcomm’s Krait core is more similar to the next generation Cortex-A15 than it is to Tegra’s A9. TI and Samsung are expected to launch dual-core Cortex-A15 SoCs this year, but Qualcomm is also planning to ramp up to a quad-core Krait this year.

The first dual-core Snapdragon S4 devices will be debuted at Mobile World Congress in just a few days, among them the rumored Asus PadFone. You will be able to get phones and tablets running the S4 in your hot little hands in the first half of 2012.

Read more at PCMag

Source

Why Qualcomm’s Mirasol color e-ink display isn’t vaporware… yet

There has been buzz amongst fans of e-readers since the news leaked in 2010 that Qualcomm has been working on a color e-ink technology named “Mirasol” to replace the existing black and white technology currently found in Kindles and Nooks. The promise of a color, power-sipping Kindle-like device sent bookworms scrambling to find out when they could get their hands on one. Unfortunately, Qualcomm has hit several hurdles in the past two years that have signaled that perhaps Mirasol is the very definition of vaporware. However, consumers should not be rushing to pronounce Mirasol’s Last Rites just yet.

While it may seem that devices like the iPad and the Kindle Fire have caused consumers to look upon e-ink as an old technology, there is one big advantage that it has over touchscreen devices: Lower power consumption. Users of the first generation (2007) Kindle can confirm getting up to fourteendays between charges, even with heavy usage. This far outstrips the touted ten-hour battery life of Apple’s tablet device. The reason e-ink based devices can achieve this kind of longevity is that they only use power when a user “turns” a page or performs another operation. Qualcomm has statedthe Mirasol-based screens use even lesspower to operate, making them even more efficient when it comes to battery life.

I believe that, between the extraordinary battery life and the fact that there are a good number of consumers out there that are not looking for a converged device like the iPad or Kindle Fire, that Mirasol actually has a good chance at market success. Executives at Qualcomm must agree since the company has put almost three billion dollars into production facilities to develop the technology. To have the screens become profitable, however, Qualcomm must make two moves.

First and foremost, the company needs to find a quality device to put a Mirasol screen on. The first commercially available color e-ink device, the Kyobo Mirasol e-reader, is receiving dismal reviews. In fact, critics are saying the only good feature the device has is the color screen. At $300, the Kyobo is an overpriced piece of clunky tech that is going to bury Mirasol in obscurity. Somehow, Qualcomm needs to strike a deal with Amazon to create a Kindle device that features Mirasol. If not Amazon, perhaps Qualcomm could peddle the feature to Microsoft to produce a totally new reading device. Mark my words though, if we see Qualcomm partner with Sony to create an e-reader, the critics will be rightwhen they label Mirasol vaporware.

Second, if Qualcomm can perfect a smartphone screen that takes advantage of Mirasol technology it could create a strong source of revenue for further development. The company has put prototypes in the public view before, but says the tech is three to four years away from being put into wide production for cell phones. That is an eternity when it comes to technology, and there is a need right now for power saving screens. Just ask Android users about the battery woes they contend with, then offer them a new screen technology that will help extend the time between charges. They will rush to their nearest mobile retail outlet ready to purchase a device making use of Mirasol.

If Qualcomm can get on the ball, Mirasol could become an important part of future media technologies — it just depends, as always, on whether Qualcomm can secure the strategic partnerships to make sure its color e-ink display gets the love it deserves.

Source