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Intel Goes ALL-IN On Windows 8 Tablets
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It appears that is working on a new type of NAND storage, offering higher data density and lower costs. The company believes the new triple-level cell ships are ideally suited for tablets and ultrabooks.
Samsung claims it is the first chipmaker to embrace triple-level cell (TLC) technology, but other companies are expected to follow suit. Unlike single-level cell (SLC) or multilevel cell (MLC), the new tech can store three bits per cell, greatly increasing density. The obvious offshoot is lower production cost, as TLC basically allows for more bits per wafer.
However, TLC also has some drawbacks. Due to its design, it is more prone to errors, less reliable and it is also slower than MLC. However, it still ends up significantly faster than hard drives and reliability issues can be worked out with a bit more digital signal processing.
Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
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It is certain that Korean electronics giant Samsung will soon be entering the server chip market.
Reports are coming in that the company has been picking up key server personnel from Intel and AMD. Samsung has been focused on developing ARM chips and stayed clear of the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
But the companies latest hires seem to indicate that might change.
Samsung’s latest recruits include veterans of the chip business like Jim Mergard, Frank Helms, who is a Fusion APU architect, Brad Burgess who designed the Bobcat APU and Patrick Patla (VP of AMD’s server business). Patla was behind the success of the Opteron chip set and has done well using the x86-server system.
Intel Appears To Be Dedicated To Tizen
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As we know Intel is not a total Windows 8 and Android shop. Although MeeGo was abandoned by Nokia in favor of huge investment from Microsoft, but Intel will continue to develop MeeGo and it will also add Tizen to its OS effort.
Tizen is a free open source mobile operating system based on Linux and backed up by Linux foundation. Tizen is planned to work on Atom N2800 and N2600 processors or simply said Cedar Trail platform and it was supposed to be out of Beta by end of Q1 2012. If all goes according to schedule it will reach its gold status by mid of Q2 2012. At some point it will also get an application store too, but release schedule is yet to be set in stone.
Intel believes that Tizen combines the communities and best technologies under one unified environment. MeeGo is supposed to have Strong developer community and LiMo should bring broad service provider support to this marriage. They will have strong support for HTML 5 and WAC (wholesale application community).
Tizen is supposed to work on ARM as well as on x86 and we can expect the first devices, or at least prototypes, to show up by the end of the year. Once it gets out it should cover mobile phones, tablets, netbooks, smart TVs and in-vehicle entertainment systems.
AMD’s Trinity To Have Fewer Cores
AMD’s soon to launch A10 5800K is a 100W quad-core Trinity 32nm CPU with 3.8 GHz base clock and 4.2GHz maximal clock possible with AMD turbo core dynamic overclocking technology.
The A10 5800K has 4MB of L2 cache, supports DDR3 1866, dual graphics configurations as well as AMD’s new FM2 socket. The fun part is new HD 7660D GPU that works at 800MHz and comes with 384 shader units. The current APU market leader A8 3870K that works at 3GHz has HD 6550 graphics with 400 cores running at 600MHz.
AMD claims that new Radeon cores from Trinity CPU including A10 5800K are more efficient and this is the main reason why you have fewer cores that can deliver superior performance. The other reason is that with 800MHz core clock they can probably process more data, meaning that HD 7660D of A10 5800K should end up quite a bit faster than the Llano A8 3870K.
All these Radeon cores are a key feature of the Vision Engine that accelerates GPU enabled applications. AMD also tells the world that Trinity is DirectX 11 compatible, supports Direct compute and the new A series of processors, including the A10 5800K all the way to dual-core A4 5300, should not have any issues playing Blu-ray 3D. The GPU part of Trinity supports AMD V, UVD3 as well as Open CL acceleration.
RIM Goes Non-BlackBerry
April 9, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Research In Motion on Tuesday launched software that will allow its large “enterprise” customers to manage Apple and other rival devices through the same servers as they use for the BlackBerry smartphone and Playbook tablet.
The new Mobile Fusion software, first announced in November, is an acknowledgement of sorts by RIM of a growing preference by many users inside big corporations and government to access professional communications over their personal devices, often the Apple iPhone or iPad, or devices running Google’s Android.
RIM, which long dominated the so-called enterprise market, has watched the BlackBerry’s market share steadily erode in recent years. Unable to arrest the trend, the company now aims to generate a fresh revenue stream from it. Mobile Fusion will cost $99 per user to license and $4 per user a month, with discounts available for bulk orders.
In a second announcement on Tuesday that highlights RIM’s eroding market position, it said its PlayBook tablet now boasts 15,000 applications – still just a tiny fraction of the number available on the iPad. One of the biggest complaints about RIM’s products is the dearth of content and applications.
A recent survey from Appcelerator and IDC showed less than 16 percent of developers were “very interested” in creating programs for RIM, compared with 90 percent for Apple and 80 percent for Android.
Android Apps To Run On Windows
Software firm Bluestacks is on a mission to close the gap between Microsoft’s Windows and Google’s Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta earlier this week.
App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run around 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said in a statement.
Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard’s Slate 2 and Dell’s Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year’s Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.
The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the previous Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM’s Mali, Nvidia’s Tegra or Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake is able to take advantage of hardware accelerators from companies like AMD found in x86 chips.
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AMD 7990 Specs Unveiled
As we draw close to the official Nvidia GTX 680 Kepler GK104 launch day it is no wonder that we’ll hear more and more about AMD’s upcoming dual-GPU HD 7990 graphics card and Chinese site INPAI has shed some new light on the dual-headed beast. Apparently, the HD 7990 will pack two Tahiti XT chips squeezed together on one PCB.
According to the post at INPAI, the upcoming HD 7990 features two 28nm GCN Tahiti XT chips, same one found on the HD 7970 graphics card. This means that we are looking at a card that will have 2048 stream processors and 3GB of memory per GPU. Appearently, these two Tahiti chips will end up clocked at 850MHz while memory will work at 1250MHz (5GHz effective).
PayPal Wooing SMB’s With Payments Service
March 23, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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PayPal is focusing on small businesses, service providers, and casual sellers on the move with its new PayPal Here service which allows vendors to process a variety of payments including checks and cards using their mobile phones.
The new service unveiled Thursday includes a free app and encrypted thumb-sized card reader, which allows merchants with an iPhone, and later Android smartphones, to process payments.
Merchants can accept payments by swiping cards in the card reader, scanning cards and checks using their phone cameras, or by entering card information manually into the app, the eBay unit said. They can also send an invoice and set payment terms, and accept PayPal payments from the app. The check facility is however only available in the U.S.
An iPhone version of the card reader and merchant app is available from Thursday to select merchants in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, with general availability in those countries scheduled for April. PayPal also plans to have an Android version of the merchant app by then. It will announce the availability of the service in more countries soon, it said.
Merchants pay a flat rate of 2.7 percent for card swipes and PayPal payments, while checks will be processed free of charge. Scanning of cards or typing the card information will be charged extra. PayPal Here merchants will also receive a business debit card for access to cash and 1 percent cash-back on eligible purchases.
PayPal will be competing with mobile payment systems from other providers such as Square and Intuit.
The key differentiator for PayPal Here in comparison to other small business mobile payment services is that it comes from a trusted brand in the online payments industry, with more than 100 million customers globally, David Marcus, vice president of mobile at PayPal said in a blog post.
Is Ivy Bridge Better Than Llano?
Ivy Bridge notebook and desktop chips will start to surface in late April. It all starts with quad cores on April 29th and in late May early June it expands to dual cores.
Since Anand already benchmarked Ivy Bridge desktop 3770K, we got quite a nice glimpse of what to expect from Ivy Bridge graphics. Still, our sources are telling us that the final graphics scores will end up significantly faster, once the new launch driver gets ready.
You should expect Llano-class performance from Ivy Bridge we were told. Llano scales from HD 6370 integrated graphics all the way to the HD 6550 DirectX 11 core, and Ivy Bridge scores should come very close to this.
Google Pressuring Developers
March 16, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Google Inc has been leaning on applications and mobile game developers to use its more expensive in-house payment service, Google Wallet, as the Internet search giant tries to copy the financial success of Apple Inc’s iOS platform.
Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods – such as PayPal, Zong and Boku – their apps would be removed from Android Market, now known as Google Play, according to developers, executives and investors in mobile gaming and payment sectors.
Developers say the Internet search giant is trying to simplify consumer payments, hoping apps-buying will rise and offset their higher costs. Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering.
“Although this move by Google might seem high-handed, it reduces the friction for purchases inside Android apps and therefore makes users more valuable,” said Hugo Troche, chief executive of Appsperse, a cross-promotion network for app discovery.
Android Market, or Google Play as it is now known, is the company’s answer to Apple’s apps store, where consumers browse and buy or download everything from games and music to individual software or applications. Google wants Google Wallet to be the dominant way that people pay for anything on this platform.