NEC develops multicore cell phone processor
688540
Engineers at NEC have developed a processor for cellular telephones that includes three ARM processor cores in a single chip, a moved aimed at improving the multimedia capabilities of cell phones.
198221
(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is pulling out the heavy artillery in its quest to build custom chips for both telephony backbone and handheld wireless devices, announcing a processor family built with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology that is usually reserved for server processors. By borrowing SOI technology from its line of Power server chips -- includingÂ the top-shelf Power6Â -- IBM will achieve a 30 percent performance gain compared to chips using standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, the company said Tuesday. And by building it on a scale of 45-nanometer feature sizes, IBM will achieve higher performance than comparable 65nm chips. IBM will launch this Cu-45HP (high performance) custom chip in early 2008, intended for manufacturers of switches and routers as well as cellphones and portable gaming systems. IBM will design a customized version of the ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) for each new client platform, said Bernard Meyerson, an IBM fellow and chief technology officer for IBM's Systems and Technology Group. The company already builds ASICs for the telephony market, but the new design will allow it to create more powerful designs in less time and at lower cost, he said. To boost power-efficiency, IBM is using 45-nm architecture embedded DRAM (dynamic RAM) instead of SRAM (static RAM) in the chip. Although DRAM has three to four times more memory density than SRAM, the company has never before used it for on-chip data storage because it is "pathetically slow," Meyerson said. IBM solved that problem with a recent advance that improves DRAM read/write data access speeds. Chips run faster and use less electricity when they use data stored on the processor itself instead of fetching that data from another location on the circuit board, he said. Once it launches the new chip, IBM expects to quickly reach full manufacturing capacity. Although the chip uses a new combination of technologies, IBM already builds processors with each of the components, such as the SOI-based processors it makes for gaming consoles including Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintendo's Wii. Despite the new features, IBM is announcing the Cu-45HP at a challenging time in the global chip market. Worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $19.9 billion in April, showing a decline from March as average selling prices continued to drop, according to a report released Monday by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). From January through April, sales were down by nearly 2 percent from the same period of 2006, the report said. The revenue slump occurred because prices have sunk faster than a modest rise in demand for consumer electronics. That consumer demand has bolstered the number of unit shipments in the market, but chip makers are collecting less money because of tumbling prices for many types of chips, including microprocessors, DRAMs and NAND flash, according to the SIA. Also on Tuesday, IBM announced new digital and analog semiconductors for mobile handsets and other wireless products. They include the SiGe BiCMOS 5PAe, a silicon-germanium-based analog product for making efficient power amplifiers in cell phones and WiMAX applications, the SiGe BiCMOS 6WL, an entry-level version of the company's existing technology for high-volume consumer electronics including cell phones and GPS (global positioning system) devices, and the CMOS 11LP, a product design to improve power efficiency in handset design. IBM is selling the 6WL design kits now, and plans to launch the other two products later in 2007. Â
272473
Taiwanese firm makes mulitmedia performance a key measure of its upcoming processor.
728685
InfoWorld - Samsung Electronics will update its mobile processor lineup with a new chip that combines a 667MHz processor core with hardware acceleration for multimedia, including 3D graphics and video, the company said Sunday.
540620
US chipmaker AMD on Monday introduced a faster mobile chip, Athlon 64 processor 3000+, for thin and light notebook computers. The new chip enables a powerful 32-bit computing
510368
TechWeb - The chipmaker's long-term roadmap includes a new micro-architecture for desktops, servers, workstations and mobile devices, code-named Nehalem
747344
Advanced Micro Devices plans to demonstrate its version of a new approach to processor design on Tuesday, with a chip that is expected to offer faster computing and relatively less power consumption.
635557
Beefier batteries and multicore chips aim to make Intel's future mobiles more like desktops.
654819
Processors offer significant power savings, chip maker says.
150939
Specifically, the companies confirmed that Cell is a multicore chip comprising a 64-bit Power processor core and multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing.
246725
Intel is moving into high-volume production of its 45-nanometer chips for servers, PCs, and mobile devices.
133041
At a meeting of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in Santa Clara later this afternoon, engineers from Intel are slated to demonstrate a working version of a conceptual CPU. As promised during the last Intel Developers' Forum, this concept CPU will incorporate 80 cores using an experimental "network-on-a-chip" architecture.
54450
Google&#39;s Android software platform for mobile phones&#160;is coming to life in Barcelona with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress on Monday.Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.One of the most polished prototypes is on the Texas Instruments stand -- although TI representatives insisted that it&#39;s just an example of how a finished product could look as the company only makes chips, leaving the development of phones to its customers. &quot;We don&#39;t do plastic,&quot; one said.TI actually had Android running on two different devices. One was based on its OMAP850, a single-chip device containing an application processor for Android and a baseband processor for controlling the phone&#39;s radio interface. The other contained TI&#39;s OMAP3430 multimedia application processor, capable of decoding high-definition television signals at a resolution of 720p. It requires a separate baseband processor, and is designed for high-end multimedia phones.Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. &quot;Android cuts that dramatically. It&#39;s a disruptor,&quot; he said.Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. &quot;Android is a single stack. You don&#39;t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,&quot; he said.Android is entering an already crowded market for mobile phone software: To see how crowded, you only had to look at the NEC stand, where four prototypes containing its Medity2 processor were packed onto a narrow table. One was running Symbian OS, one Windows Mobile, one Android on top of Wind River Linux, and the last was running the same Wind River Linux but with a different application layer based on software from Trolltech and Esmertec.NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.The two systems are not necessarily in competition, though. With Android&#39;s focus on the application layer and Limo&#39;s work on the middleware, the underlying services needed to link applications to the Linux kernel, the two can be complementary, NEC staff said.Marvell took the prize for the most secretive Android demonstrations, refusing to allow photographs and declining even to say on which of its communications processors the software was running. The company showed a compact handset running the Android interface with a bare minimum of applications and a more complete installation playing video and browsing the Web on a bulky development board. Shrinking that down to a pocket-sized device will not take long, staff said. In fact, they had one ready -- just not loaded with the Android software.Android&#39;s Linux roots are likely to encourage the development of a wave of new handset applications, said Marvell&#39;s marketing director Vish Deshmane.&quot;You will see a lot more software to run on devices from people who want to exploit the commonality with desktop systems. It&#39;s going to be a boon for the 3G world because more applications means more data traffic, so operators will be happy,&quot; he said.Over at Freescale Semiconductor, staff showed Google Maps zooming in on the center of Barcelona on a development board built around Freescale&#39;s i.MX31 processor. This processor is not intended for mobile phones at all, and is more at home in GPS&#160;terminals or media players such as Toshiba&#39;s Gigabit and Microsoft&#39;s Zune.Qualcomm&#39;s demonstration of its 7201 combined baseband and application processor sparkled, but did not exploit the chip&#39;s full potential. The spinning globe of Android&#39;s Global Time application turned smoothly even without the assistance of the 3D graphics hardware acceleration, for which the drivers are not yet ready, said Rob Woodford.Android phones based on the chip will go on sale in the second half of this year, Woodford said -- but U.S. readers should contain their excitement: the Qualcomm display was overshadowed by a card warning that&#160;it may be prohibited from shipping the products on show to the U.S.&#160;because of a Dec. 31 court injunction obtained by chip rival Broadcom in a patent infringement case.The Mobile World Congress runs through Thursday at the Fira de Barcelona showground.
351271
InfoWorld - IBM&#160;is pulling out the heavy artillery in its quest to build custom chips for both telephony backbone and handheld wireless devices, announcing a processor family built with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology that is usually reserved for server processors.
205811
TOKYO - IBM, Sony and Toshiba on Monday announced the first technical details of the widely-anticipated &quot;Cell&quot; processor, also known as a &quot;supercomputer on a chip,&quot; with Power architecture at its heart.
546354
BISMARCK, N.D. &#151; Jack Uldrich says his stain-resistant pants are just the beginning for a technology that could someday be used to create cell phones so small they can be sewn into clothes and enhance electrical transmission through power lines.
52336
Based on Intel&#39;s mobile architecture, the new Intel Pentium M processor 765 processor features 2MB of integrated, power-managed Level 2 cache and a frequency of 2.10 GHz.