Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
No LTE On IBM’s SoC Until 2014
Intel is working on integrated LTE modems for its upcoming SoC designs, but CEO Paul Otellini claims they will not be ready for prime time until 2014.
In a recent conference call Otellini was directly asked about Intel’s plans for LTE integration and said “higher levels of integration” are expected next year. He went on to say that the first Intel-based phones with LTE should launch in early 2014, in time for the Mobile World Congress.
Otellini said Intel’s wireless team, formerly a business unit of Infineon, is making good progress in LTE.
“We believe we have a very competitive solution. The Infineon team is known for not necessarily being first to market, but being really good at engineering a very solid solution and being cost effective and cost competitive and I think that they are doing a very good job with respect to this product,” said Otellini.
Is Intel Really Catching ARM?
A new report suggests that Intel is close to matching ARM on power efficiency.
The study by Bernstein Research analysts said that the days of Intel being mocked because its power-hungry chips shortened the battery life of mobile devices could be over. Bernstein noted that the ARM camp has such a commanding lead in phones and tablets that Intel probably won’t make much of a dent in those markets for a couple of years — even with its energy-efficient chips.
But it said that both company’s chip types “are very close in terms of power efficiency and processing power.” It said that the fight between the ARM and Intel camps will heat up meaningfully as early as 2013, with likely damages on both sides and no winner. For its study, Bernstein compared Intel’s chip in a Motorola RAZR phone and a RAZR phone with an ARM chip. It also compared both chips in similar tablets outfitted with the Windows 8.
The bad news in the report for Intel was that ARM’s chips have become more powerful, making them “a very compelling choice” for consumers looking for low-end notebooks.
Intel Details 22nm SoC
Thanks to a long spate of bad luck over at AMD, Intel now finds itself in a rather safe market lead, at least in high-end and server markets. However, in the low-end and mobile, Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
ARM still dominates the mobile market and Intel is looking to take on the British chip designer with new 22nm SoCs of its own. Intel outlined its SoC strategy at the 2012 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco the other day.
The cunning plan involves 3D tri gate transistors and Intel’s 22nm fabrication process, or in other words it is a brute force approach. Intel can afford to integrate the latest tech in cheep and cheerful 22nm Atoms, thus making them more competitive in terms of power efficiency.
Since Intel leads the way with new manufacturing processes it already has roughly a year of experience with 22nm chips, while ARM partners rely on 28nm, 32nm and more often than not, 40nm processes. Intel’s next generation SoCs will also benefit from other off-the-shelf Intel tech, such as 3D tri-gate transistors.
ARM Goes High-End
Nvidia is itself an ARM chip licensee that has seen significant design wins with its Tegra 3 system-on-chip (SoC) processor, however the firm doesn’t see ARM based servers being able to do heavy lifting in server tasks for two years. Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing business unit said that even with GPGPUs, ARM based servers are not yet able to provide the computing power needed to drive high performance servers.
Gupta said, “Performance of these ARM cores is still not where it needs to be for servers. It is getting there; the new ARM64 [processor] is going to get it part of the way.” However he did say that eventually ARM SoCs could hit X86-like performance levels. “One day I think ARM will at least get to similar performance levels as X86 performance. The belief is that over the next one or two years these ARM SoCs will be good enough for cloud applications and web serving. I think it will take some more time to be good enough for accelerated computing.”
As for Nvidia using its Tegra chips to push work to the firm’s GPGPUs, a scenario that would make the firm’s accountants very happy, Gupta said he was surprised at the level of interest from developers and questioned the need for powerful CPUs. “We did a small development kit called Karma that has a Tegra 3 and a Nvidia GPU, [and] I was shocked by the number of those kits that have been sold. The interest in this ARM plus GPU is far larger than even I expected. If the GPU can do dynamic parallelism, it becomes more independent than how powerful CPUs do you need? I believe the first thing that will happen is that people will start using lower performing [Intel] Xeons […] then at some point when these Atom based processors become available they might use that, and when ARM64 is available they’ll use that.”
ARM Seeing Growth
ARM and Vivante have achieved significant market share gains in the system-on-chip (SoC) GPU market while Imagination and Qualcomm have seen their market shares fall.
ARM has been aggressively pushing its Mali GPU design for the last two years, while Vivante has ridden the surge in Chinese tablet sales, and these factors have resulted in both firms increasing market shares. Analyst outfit Jon Peddie Research claimed that ARM and Vivante scored first half 2012 SoC GPU market shares of 12.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively, while the SoC GPU market share leaders Imagination and Qualcomm both suffered declines.
ARM more than doubled its market share from the same period a year ago while Vivante went even better by almost quadrupling its market share. Not only were both firms claiming large pieces of the pie, Jon Peddie Research claimed the SoC GPU market had increased by 91.3 percent, suggesting that Qualcomm and Imagination are having a harder time getting new business. Jon Peddie told The INQUIRER that new vendors are entering the market, typically with lower prices to earn customers.
Nvidia’s SoC GPU operations accounted for 2.5 percent of the total smartphone and tablet market, which given that the firm doesn’t license out its GPU designs is pretty impressive. Nvidia could see its market share increase if Microsoft’s Surface tablet sells well.
Will Intel Bring Medfield To The US?
September 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Computing, Smartphones
Comments Off on Will Intel Bring Medfield To The US?
An Intel powered phone powered by a 2GHz Medfield processor is a huge leap forward for Intel. After few tries they finally got a significant design win.
Still many want to see an Intel design win the US market and we were told that this can be expected at 2013 as the USA network providers demand a LTE capability for all their new phones. Now even the iPhone has LTE and it was getting hard even for Apple to convince people in the US that LTE is not relevant.
Intel is aware of that and it is expected that Intel can finish its LTE modem in 2013 and that it will have a LTE enabled chip with its next generation. It’s interesting that this is the same timing for Nvidia LTE while Qualcomm already stunned the market with its S4 LTE enabled chip that everyone wants.
The new Intel-based RAZR doesn’t have LTE support, but even in the US only major cities and metropolitan areas have it decent LTE coverage. Even the suburbs in Silicon valley and surrounding towns have weak and intermittent LTE coverage, while 3G has been almost everywhere you can have a cell signal.
Intel got its first major designs out, and it plans to continue winning the major manufacturers with Intel inside powered phones.
Will ARM Get OpenCL Certification?
ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU for OpenCL certification.
ARM’s Mali GPUs have so far shyed away from GPGPU support, however as smartphones and tablets are not expected to see an ever growing number of processor cores the cries for OpenCL support in its GPUs have been growing louder. Now ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU to the Khronos consortium for full profile OpenCL certification.
The Khronos consortium oversees the development of OpenCL and the high-level language is supported by a number of firms including AMD, Nvidia and Intel on their latest GPUs. However until now there hasn’t been an OpenCL certified GPU that is used in smartphones, though firms such as Zii Labs also boast OpenCL support for their chips.
ARM said, “Building on a scalable multicore, multi-pipeline architecture design, the Mali-T600 Series GPU includes a number of advanced features. In particular, native scalar and vector operations for OpenCL’s integer and floating point data types (including 64-bit); support for static and dynamic compilation; hardware accelerated image and sampler data types; fast atomic operations and compliance to IEEE754-2008 precision requirements.
ARM Profits On The Rise
ARM has reported good second quarter financial results, with profit rising by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM has been riding high in the public consciousness thanks to firms such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia pushing its chip architecture into smartphones and tablets. The firm announced it managed to take in $209.78 millio in revenue during the second quarter, a 15 per cent increase from the same period last year, while net income rose even faster by 23 per cent to $102.97 million.
ARM said two billion chips using the firm’s various design models were shipped during the quarter, which represented a nine per cent increase from last year. The firm revealed that its core money making operation, processor royalties, rose by 14 per cent.
Warren East, CEO of ARM said, “ARM’s royalty revenues continued to outperform the overall semiconductor industry as our customers gained market share within existing markets and launched products which are taking ARM technology into new markets.
“This quarter we have seen multiple market leaders announce exciting new products including computers and servers from Dell and Microsoft, and embedded applications from Freescale and Toshiba. In addition, ARM and TSMC announced a partnership to optimise next generation ARM processors and physical IP and TSMC’s FinFET process technology.”
Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
Comments Off on Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
It is certain that Korean electronics giant Samsung will soon be entering the server chip market.
Reports are coming in that the company has been picking up key server personnel from Intel and AMD. Samsung has been focused on developing ARM chips and stayed clear of the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
But the companies latest hires seem to indicate that might change.
Samsung’s latest recruits include veterans of the chip business like Jim Mergard, Frank Helms, who is a Fusion APU architect, Brad Burgess who designed the Bobcat APU and Patrick Patla (VP of AMD’s server business). Patla was behind the success of the Opteron chip set and has done well using the x86-server system.
Will Samsung Release A Quad-Core Processor?
Comments Off on Will Samsung Release A Quad-Core Processor?
Samsung is reportedly developing a new quad-core chip that will power its next generation Galaxy series flagship smartphone.
According to androidandme.com, the Korean giant is preparing a new 32nm quad-core chip, the Exynos 4412. The new chip is based on the A9 architecture and it will run at speeds of up to 1.5GHz. Moreover, Samsung went for ARM Mali-400 graphics in the current Exynos 4210, so there is a good chance the new chip will include next generation Mali-604 graphics.
In terms of performance, the new chip could be a rather impressive beast. Compared to Nvidia’s Tegra 3, the Exynos could squeeze out a bit more performance per watt, thanks to its superior manufacturing process. On the graphics front, it could also sneak ahead of both Tegra 3 and Apple’s A5, with the SGX 543MP2 graphics core. The new chip should debut in early 2012 if all goes well.
Interestingly, Samsung has been keen to embrace processors and graphics solutions from a number of companies in the past. Even now, the company is selling a rather awkward mix of phones and tablets based on Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments chips. Basically Samsung is in bed with everyone, but it is obviously taking mobile chip development seriously and we could see some if not all third-party suppliers phased out sometime in the future.
..