Google Unveils $249 Samsung Exynos 5 (Cortex A15) Chromebook

Back in April, we already knew Google was working on a Chromebook codenamed ‘Daisy’ based on the latest Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Cortex A15 processor, and finally, Google officially announced their first ARM based Chromebook yesterday. The specifications of the new Chromebook are as follows: SoC – Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Core Cortex A15 Processor @ 1.7 GHz with Mali T-604 GPU System Memory – 2 GB DDR3L SDRAM Storage: 16 GB SSD SD Card slot 100 GB Google Drive Cloud Storage (Free for 2 years) Display – 11.6″ LED panel (1366×768) Video Out – HDMI Connectivity Dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n Bluetooth 3.0 compatible (But Bluetooth does not seem to be present in the device) USB – 1x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0 host ports Camera – Front VGA camera Battery – 6.5 hours typical use (No capacity info) Weight – 1.1 kg There’s no Ethernet contrary to […]

Texas Instruments OMAP5 Demo at MWC 2012

Charbax of armdevices.net has uploaded a very interesting video with an OMAP5430 demo and an interview at Texas Instruments booth at MWC 2012. Using the OMAP5 development kit, they demo several 3D applications, the web browser and the picture gallery and it looks extremely smooth. They discussed about the OMAP5 vs Tegra 3 benchmark, and it appears mobile web browsers are not yet optimized for more than 2 cores which could explain the performance difference somewhat. The OMAP5 currently runs at 800 MHz, but there will eventually be 2 versions: 1.7 and 2.0 GHz when the OMAP 5 AP is released. This should show a performance improvement of over 4x against the Tegra 3, although I’m sure in the meantime, Nvidia will have announced the Tegra 4 (Wayne). The OMAP 5 also offers impressive improvement in power consumption, as the SGX544 GPU cores are augmented by a dedicated 2D hardware-accelerated […]

Midgard architecture for Embedded GPUs (Mali-T604 / Mali T658)

I’ve attended a webinar entitled “Harness the power and flexibility of the Midgard architecture for Embedded GPUs” presented Steve Steele, Product Manager at ARM Media Processing Division and sponsored by EETimes. Steve starts to talk about the current GPU architecture “Utgard” used in Mali-200, Mali-300 and Mali-400MP which allows resolutions up to 1080p and are used in many smartphones today including Samsung Galaxy S2 (Mali-400MP) which provides great graphics performance. He then explains how mobile devices are used today and what performance we may except in the future: Mobile As Main compute platform: New UI and Augmented Reality Social Networks and emails Content Creation/consumption 1 Device to multiple screen (e.g LCD screen and TV via HDMI) Evolving Processing Demand: Graphics Complexity multiplied by 25 Increase in screen size (1080p resolution support). Graphics API: Khronos OpenGL ES, Microsoft DirectX 11 Compute API: OpenCL, Renderscript Compute and Direct Compute. After this overview, […]

ARM Announces New Mali-T658 GPU

About one year ago, ARM announced the Mali-T604 GPU which has yet to be used in current products. Yet today, ARM announced an even more powerful GPU called Mali-T658 in Tokyo at Japan ARM Technical Symposium. Mali T658 is based on Midgard GPU architecture (as is Mali T604) which allows great GPGPU capabilities thanks to three types of pipeline (‘tri-pipe’) optimized repetitively for arithmetic, load/store and texturing. The GPU will also support standard graphics APIs such as Khronos OpenGL ES, OpenVG andMicrosoft DirectX® 11) as well as Compute APIs such as Khronos OpenCL (Full Profile), Google RenderScript compute and Microsoft DirectCompute. Performance-wise, Mali-T658 has twice as many shader cores and double the arithmetic pipelines per core which means the GPU can offer up to 10 times the performance of the Mali-400 MP GPU. On the compute side, Mali-T658 provides 4 times the processing power of Mali-T604. Mali-T658 will work with […]

Linaro 11.10 Release with Linux Kernel 3.1

Linaro has just released version 11.10 based on Linux Kernel 3.1. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Audio playback and recording works on LEB-panda. TJBench into all Android builds benchmarked against the original Android libjpeg implementation: TomGall/LibJpegTurbo All strict-aliasing violations in 2.3.5 have been fixed and sent to AOSP. (for build optimization) Linaro Gerrit is integrated with Android Build Service for change verification as part of Continuous Integration effort. Tip toolchain tracked and released against all targets for 11.10. iMX53 will now boot with a 3.0 or later Android Kernel. The multimedia test application has been extended to cover encoding and give better benchmark results. Linaro’s Android distribution can now base builds off a tip toolchain build. Linaro’s 11.09 toolchain has been benchmarked. USB camera (UVC) now works on linaro-android builds. Developer Platform The Linux Linaro packages are now generated and validated in a continuous integration loop. New […]

ARM big.LITTLE Processing Demo

ARM uploaded a big.LITTLE demonstration by Nandan Nayampally, Director, Product Marketing. The demo runs the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) with graphs showing CPU usage and when Cortex A7 / A15 is running. At the beginning Cortex A7 handles the background tasks, and when they start the Android Browser, Cortex A15 is used instead to render the page and once this is done, the system switches back to Cortex A7. Scrolling the webpage will increase CPU usage, but this will still be handled by Cortex A7. They did not have to do any modifications to Android, but they just added a big.LITTLE aware Power Management Driver which will be open sourced and integrated in future version of the linaro kernel. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later […]

ARM Unveils Cortex-A7 and big.LITTLE processing

ARM unveiled the Cortex A7, a new core with higher performance than the Cortex A8 (1.5x) and with 5 times less power consumption. It will be used in conjunction with Cortex-A15 Core and allows big.LITTLE processing where the Cortex A7 (companion core) takes care of the low performance, low power tasks (social network, email, SMS, phone calls) and the Cortex A15 kicks in for high performance tasks such as video processing and gaming. Here’s an excerpt of the Cortex A7 / big.LITTLE processing press release: ARM today announced the ARM® Cortex™-A7 MPCore™ processor – the most energy-efficient application class processor ARM has ever developed, and big.LITTLE processing – a flexible approach that redefines the traditional power and performance relationship. The Cortex-A7 processor builds on the low-power leadership established by the Cortex-A8 processor that is at the heart of many of today’s most popular smartphones. A single Cortex-A7 processor delivers 5x […]

Texas Instruments OMAP 5 based on ARM Cortex A15 Core

Texas Instruments announced its new generation of mobile chips OMAP 5 based on the latest ARM core Cortex A15.  Press release excerpt: DALLAS (Feb. 7, 2011) /PRNewswire/ — Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced today the next generation of its popular OMAP™ family: the OMAP 5 mobile applications platform, which is positioned to transform how mobile devices, such as Smartphones, tablets and other mobile form factors are used, making them even more valuable in our daily lives. … The 28 nanometer OMAP 5 applications processors carry on the OMAP family tradition of delivering significant increases in performance and functionality, while lowering power consumption compared to their predecessors. Specifically, they offer up to 3x processing performance and five-fold 3D graphics improvement, yet provide a nearly 60 percent average power reduction compared to a sample user experience on the OMAP 4 platform. Additionally, the OMAP 5 platform’s software is designed for […]

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