Samsung Goes Eight Cores

It was only a matter of time before someone got the cunning idea to build an eight-core ARM chip and Samsung seems to have taken up the challenge.

The Korean giant will detail its first eight-core SoC at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The 28nm part features two stitched quad-core clusters, based on A7 and A15 cores, hence the name – big.little.

The A7 cluster runs at up to 1.2GHz, while the A15 cluster can hit 1.8GHz, and it packs 2MB of L2 cache. It sounds like an intriguing concept, a bit like Nvidia’s companion core taken to the next level. The “little” cluster is tuned for energy efficiency, while the beefy A15 cluster should deliver unparalleled performance.

But what about real life applications? Eight cores sound like overkill for smartphones and even high end tablets, so it is unclear whether the big.little chip will find its way into actual products anytime soon.

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Sprint Finally Gets The iPhone

Sprint Nextel confirmed that it will offer the next version of Apple Inc’s iPhone, ending months of speculation about whether it would become the third U.S. carrier to sell the popular device.

But the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider would not say whether its iPhone would come with a flat-fee service for unlimited data use – an offering analysts see as Sprint’s only hope for making its iPhone more competitive than rivals.

While selling the device should help Sprint keep subscribers from fleeing to other operators, some analysts worried whether the costs would outweigh the benefits because Apple phones come at a steep premium to other devices.

This is a huge gamble for Sprint and people are justifiably worried that they won’t be able to make any money doing it. It’s not a company that’s in great financial shape right now,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King.

Analysts questioned how Sprint will be able to find the money to pay a premium to Apple on top of its obligations to pay back billions of dollars in debt and its plan to spend about $5 billion on an network upgrade in coming years.

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Playbook Set To Launch April 19th

This is shaping up to be quite the season for the tablet wars as Research In Motion’s long-awaited device, the BlackBerry PlayBook, is set to go on sale in the United States and Canada on April 19 at a base price of $499.

RIM said on Tuesday it plans to sell the PlayBook through retailers and wireless carriers including Best Buy, AT&T, Verizon, Radioshack, Sears Canada and Wal-Mart.  ReadMore….