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

There's a New Species Evolving in PC Space Right Before our Eyes!

These evolutionary changes were happening for sometime now. The classic Wintel (Window + Intel) species have ruled the PC landscape for quite some time now. I am assuming the laptop to be a simple variant of the same PC model. Real change came with the introduction of the netbook. While the OS remained the Windows predominantly, there was a new processor, the Intel Atom. But it was still WinTel. It was sufficiently different variant of the PC. It was designed to be lower powered, meant for the surfing, mail and such Internet based applications in a very convenient, highly portable format.

Suddenly, there is a lot of activity in the Tablet format. Not that the species evolved just now. It has been around for some time.There were periodic attempts at  creating a tablet that will catch the fancy of users. The scene fairly exploded recently with the coming out of the iPad. Just today I read a report it has sold a million pieces in the 28 days it has been selling. There are many tablets in the works. Here are some examples. As with any evolutionary situation, some tablets are getting killed too! Microsoft seems to have killed its version for the tablet space. So did HP apparently, they killed the "slate" model they were readying for the market. Netbook sales seem to have flattened. So is tablet the next avatar of the personal computer. looks like hat. I personally think that's what's going to to happen. Let's see!