Mobile World Congress: The new front in the processor battle | ZDNet

Mobile world congress took place in Feb. looks like the next generation processors are coming out from a whole range of manufacturers. With smartphones demanding powerful applications, with demand for some of the productivity applications on the go, the phones are looking more like a computer. The mobile computing may finally be here. Besides there is a lot of activity in the Tablet space. More and more powerful processors will be coming out over this year and the next. Broadcom, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments all have new application processors coming out. This generation is certainly for multi-core and graphics enhancements. Graphics enhancements are, no doubt, driven by the need for handling video, HD as well as 3D, if possible. A sampling of the capabilities of these new processors bear it out.


Nvidia has the Tegra2 line. The newer Tegra will have four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and a 12 core graphics processor. Tegra 2 had eight graphics cores and the new line delivers 5x the graphics performance. The current roadmap promises delivery of 75x graphics processing by 2014. Qualcom integrated the wireless communications and the processor in its Snapdragon line. The new enhancements coming are PQ 8060, a dual core processor and Adreno 220 graphics. APQW 8064 will have four cores running at 2.5 GHz and Adreno 320 graphics. 15% better performance and 15x graphics enhancements are predicted.

Samsung's Exynos 4210 will have two Cortex-A9 cores at 1GHz.  TI’s OMAP4430 is based on two Cortex-A9 cores running at 1GHz and Imagination’s PowerVR540 graphics. OMAP4440 follows that'll work at 1.5GHz and has better graphics performance. OMAP 5 platform will be based on ARM’s Cortex-A15. With two CPU cores and multi-core graphics, OMAP 5 will have 3x the processing power and 5x better 3D graphics than OMAP 4.

These are just some of the things happening in the processor space. Read the complete article for some more examples of the upcoming processors.

Mobile World Congress: The new front in the processor battle

Nvidia challenges Intel with PC central processors

A PC and WINTEL were synonymous until now. Not any more. The recent CES at Las Vegas in first week of January brought news that changes that relationship for  ever, I guess. PC meant Intel processors that kept building on the original 8086 architecture. Other than AMD no one else challenged that. NVIDIA was happy to build chips and boards for supporting graphics and video on the huge numbers of PC  being sold. That changes now and NVIDIA has announced a processor that can go inside the PC.

The company is going to build a central processor using ARM architecture. The processors will be integrated on the same chip as NVIDIA's graphic processor and will be aimed at everything from workstations to supercomputers. "We are designing a high-performing ARM CPU core in combination with our massively parallel GPU cores to create a new class of processor," said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA CEO. This they expect would free the PCs, workstations and servers from the hegemony and inefficiency of the x86 (Intel) architecture.

What makes this really feasible is the announcement from Microsoft that they will be releasing a Windows version (Windows 8!) for the ARM processor.

CES-UPDATE 3-Nvidia challenges Intel with PC central processors | Reuters