SoCs
Throughout the world, if there's one universal constant in the smartphone and mobile device market, it's Arm. Whether it's mobile chip makers basing their SoCs on Arm's fully synthesized CPU cores, or just relying on the Arm ISA and designing their own chips, at the end of the day, Arm underlies virtually all of it. That kind of market saturation and relevance is a testament to all of the hard work that Arm has done in the last few decades getting to this point, but it's also a grave responsibility – for most mobile SoCs, their performance only moves forward as quickly as Arm's own CPU core designs and associated IP do. Consequently, we've seen Arm settle into a yearly cadence for their client IP...
Intel Brings Core Down to 7W, Introduces a New Power Rating to Get There: Y-Series SKUs Demystified
For all of modern Intel history, it has specified a TDP rating for all of its silicon. The TDP rating is given at a specific max core temperature (Tj_MAX...
56 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/14/2013Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa: Powered by PowerVR SGX 544MP3, not ARM's Mali
At CES, Samsung announced its Exynos 5 Octa SoC featuring four ARM Cortex A7s and four ARM Cortex A15s. Unusually absent from the announcement was any mention of the...
43 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 1/13/2013Imagination Demonstrates PowerVR Series6 Rogue on LG's H13 SoC
I stopped by Imagination Technologies at CES 2013 and talked about their upcoming GPU IP blocks and a few recently announced SoCs, and one demo caught my eye running...
6 by Brian Klug on 1/12/2013Hands On with the Huawei Ascend W1, Ascend D2, and Ascend Mate
There hasn't been much in the way of mobile handset news out of CES 2013 this year, save some announcements by Huawei this morning. I didn't get a chance...
5 by Brian Klug on 1/8/2013Qualcomm's Next-Gen Krait 400 & Krait 300 Announced in Snapdragon 800 & 600 SoCs
We've been hinting at this for a while, both on the Podcast and in our most recent power analysis piece, but today it's very official: Qualcomm is announcing the...
22 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 1/7/2013More Details on NVIDIA's Tegra 4 & i500: 5th core is A15, 28nm HPL, UE Category 3 LTE
We just finished NVIDIA's CES press conference where it introduced the Tegra 4 SoC and Shield mobile gaming console. Immediately following the press event we snagged some more information...
34 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 1/7/2013NVIDIA CES 2013 Press Event: Live Blog
We just sat down for NVIDIA's Pre-CES press event. Things are running a bit late now, but we expect the event to start in the next 15 minutes. Keep...
42 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 1/6/2013NVIDIA's Pre-CES Press Conference: Live Webcast Starts At 8pm PST
Even though CES doesn't officially start until Tuesday, things are already kicking off in Las Vegas. The Storage Visions 2013 conference runs through Monday, and meanwhile a number of...
1 by Ryan Smith on 1/6/2013The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 13
We're back! In our first podcast of 2013 we go over some of the best products of 2012 and Haswell/ValleyView launch schedules. Brian talks about Field Test being removed...
16 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/6/2013The ARM vs x86 Wars Have Begun: In-Depth Power Analysis of Atom, Krait & Cortex A15
Late last month, Intel dropped by my office with a power engineer for a rare demonstration of its competitive position versus NVIDIA's Tegra 3 when it came to power...
140 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 1/4/2013The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis
The untold story of Intel's desktop (and notebook) CPU dominance after 2006 has nothing to do with novel new approaches to chip design or spending billions on keeping its...
163 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/24/2012The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer's W510 Tested
Microsoft’s Windows 8/RT launch has been a bit choppier than expected. I remember hearing rumors that the OS release could slip into next year, but it seems that the...
104 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/20/2012The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 12
Today's podcast covers two major topics: the rumored BGA-only version of Intel's Broadwell (2014/2015) CPU and Qualcomm's disclosures at its recent analyst day. The Broadwell BGA topic spawned a...
25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 12/3/2012The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 10
We've made it to 10 episodes of the AnandTech Podcast! As promised, this week's episode is a bit more PC focused as we discuss the future of AMD. Intel's...
32 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/21/2012iPad 4 GPU Performance Analyzed: PowerVR SGX 554MP4 Under the Hood
As always, our good friends over at Kishonti managed to have the first GPU performance results for the new 4th generation iPad. Although the new iPad retains its 2048...
114 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/2/2012Google Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 Performance Preview
Earlier this week Google announced two new flagship Nexus devices: the Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 10 tablet. We received review samples of both earlier this week, and...
244 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 11/2/2012ARM's Cortex A57 and Cortex A53: The First 64-bit ARMv8 CPU Cores
Yesterday AMD revealed that in 2014 it would begin production of its first ARMv8 based 64-bit Opteron CPUs. At the time we didn't know what core AMD would use...
118 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/30/2012Intel Details Atom Z2760: Clovertrail for Windows 8 Tablets
For much of the past year we've been hearing that Intel's Atom for Windows 8 tablets is going to be the one to beat. Ivy Bridge (and later, Haswell...
78 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/27/2012The iPhone 5 Performance Preview
This morning we finally got our hands on Apple's iPhone 5. While we are eager to get started on battery life testing, that'll happen late tonight after a full...
239 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/21/2012Apple A6 Die Revealed: 3-core GPU, < 100mm^2
Our good friends at UBM TechInsights sent over the first diffusion images of Apple's new A6 SoC. It's still too early to tell a lot but we have confirmation...
61 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/21/2012