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MediaTek’s Octa-Core Processor Tested
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MediaTek raised quite a few eyebrows earlier this year when it announced it would build the world’s first proper ARM octa-core, not a big.LITTLE design. The MT6592 has now popped up on a Chinese site, with the first Antutu results.
It scored 25,496, which places it behind the 1.7GHz Snapdragon in the HTC One, but it’s still a lot faster than the Nexus 4’s Qualcomm APQ8064, although throttling may have something to do with that. The score seems too high, but not long after the results emerged, a number of mobile sites started talking about disappointing results, claiming that MediaTek’s octa-core was somehow supposed to end up on a par with Samsung’s latest Exynos 5 big.LITTLE chip and the Qualcomm 800.
This of course is utter rubbish and FUD of the highest order.
The 28nm MT6592 is indeed an octa-core, but it has eight A7 cores, not a combo of A15 and A7 cores. The A7 is about one fifth of the die area of an A15 and according to ARM it consumes one quarter to one fifth of the power, making such comparisons asinine. In other words, MediaTek’s octa-core should end up a lot smaller and cheaper than a quad A15, maybe even a quad A12. That is why we find the 25,496 result hard to believe – it should be less, not more. For example, the Tegra 4 on Shield hits about 36,000, yet it’s a much bigger chip, on a device with more RAM.
The benchmarked chip ran at 1.7GHz, but MediaTek said the MT6592 should have no trouble hitting 2GHz, which could make it faster than a Snapdragon 600. What’s more, the tested device featured 1GB of RAM, 720p display and a Mali-450 GPU, so it is clearly not high-end.
However, the big problem for MediaTek’s curious new SoC is the sheer number of cores. Most apps simply can’t put them to good use and unless MediaTek has a clever trick up its sleeve, the chip might not be nearly as fast in real world applications. It does look promising in benchmarks, though.
Windows 8 ‘Grace Period’ Ends
Microsoft has halted the 30-day grace period, a trademark of Windows 7, in the retail copies of Windows 8, requiring that users provide a product key during setup.
The change runs counter to previous practice by the Redmond, Wash. developer. With Windows 7, for example, users could run the OS for 30 days before activating the copy by providing a legitimate key.
That “grace period” was used by some to evaluate the software prior to purchasing, to save up to $100 by using an “upgrade” license to install the OS on a newly-formatted hard drive, and to create physical partitions or virtual machines for quick testing purposes.
Because Windows 8 handles activation differently, the grace period has been eliminated.
As several blogs have noted, customers must enter a unique product key — a 25-character alpha-numeric string — to proceed during Windows 8 setup. Failure to do so stops the process in its tracks. The Consumer Preview and Release Preview used this technique too, although Microsoft provided users a generic key for those sneak peeks.
Once Windows 8 is installed — assuming the machine is connected to the Internet — it automatically seeks out a Microsoft server to verify that the key is valid and then activates the OS. “If the licensed computer is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically connect to Microsoft for activation,” states the end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, for Windows 8 Pro.
ZTE Pushes Past RIM
ZTE became the world’s fifth largest smartphone vendor in the second quarter, it announced today, overtaking Research in Motion (RIM).
That’s according to research firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, which shows that thanks to sales of eight million smartphones in the second quarter ZTE has slipped onto the top five list. RIM, which was fourth on the list in May, is now nowhere to be seen, as sales of the firm’s Blackberry handsets continue to falter.
With eight millions smartphones shifted in the second quarter, ZTE’s shipments increased 300 per cent compared to the second quarter last year, helping it snatch a 5.2 per cent share of the worldwide market and making it the fastest growing smartphone maker after Apple. This puts the firm just 0.5 per cent behind Android phone maker HTC and just 1.4 per cent behind Nokia.
Unsurprisingly, rivals Apple and Samsung fill the top two spots, holding on to 16.9 per cent and 32.6 per cent of the smartphone market, respectively.
“ZTE’s great smartphone performance in 2012 in international markets has been a major contributor to our consistent expansion, and is a demonstration of the depth and strength of our R & D,” said ZTE EVP and head of its Terminal Division He Shiyou.
“We have moved into the middle to high-end smartphone market with the recent launch of the ZTE Grand X in countries including China, Turkey and the UK, and we will continue to build our handset capabilities in the middle and high range sectors, while still delivering great lower-end smartphones like the ZTE Kis.”
Mozilla Fixes Major Security Issues
July 26, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Mozilla has fixed a number of security vulnerabilities in the latest versions of its internet applications, including Firefox 14, Thunderbird 14 and Seamonkey 2.11.
Following the release of its Firefox 14 browser for desktop operating systems on Tuesday, Mozilla said it has removed security holes in the Gecko rendering engine that all the applications run, some of which it rated as “critical”.
The bugs fixed included a code execution problem related to javascript URLs, a JSDependentString::undepend string conversion bug that can be exploited to cause a crash and a same-compartment Security Wrappers bypass issue.
Critical use-after-free problems, an out-of-bounds read bug, and a bad cast in the Gecko engine that could lead to memory corruption have also been addressed, Mozilla said.
These bugs were deemed “critical” due to their vulnerability to being exploited remotely by hackers that could execute arbitrary code on an unsuspecting victim’s system.
WIN8 Enter Final Pre-Beta
Microsoft Windows developer build tracking site Winunleaked.tk has recently updated its Windows 8 build number page, documenting the milestones Microsoft developers have been achieving in the compilation of the Windows 8 operating system. According to the latest numbers, it appears that the company has just released the final pre-beta build, marking another significant milestone in the release cycle of the operating system.
The site claims Microsoft’s own testers will then vote on which of the next Windows 8 builds will become the “Final Beta,” with a voting decision being made on Saturday, January 28th. The final beta build will then be shown at an internal Microsoft preview on Monday, January 30th.
The official pre-beta build number is 8189.0.winmain.120120-1830, and according to the site, the next builds for Windows 8 will be labeled as “Beta Escrow” builds. Additionally, the operating system roadmap claims that the “Final Beta” build to be released to the public will be named “winmain_win8b1.”
Xoom Tablets To Get Android 4.0
January 27, 2012 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
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Motorola Mobility has confirmed the Android Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade to the Xoom Wi-Fi tablet will arrive over-the-air via Wi-Fi to U.S.-based devices on Wednesday.
In addition to faster browser rendering, the free update lets users type via voice and includes a Data Manager tool for monitoring and controlling network data usage, something seen as especially helpful to reviewers of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich, also called Android 4.0.
Motorola called it the first tablet of its kind to receive the upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, though the update for the Asus Transformer Prime tablet was distributed a week ago, as several bloggers, including Slashgear noticed.
Microsoft and Others Enable IPv6
The so-called worldwide launch of IPv6 has been set for 6 June 2012, when companies will permanently enable IPv6 connectivity in their products and services.
Following the relative success of 2011′s IPv6 day, a number of firms including Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have pledged support for “World IPv6 Launch” day, which has been set as 6 June 2012. On that day the companies have pledged to permanently enable IPv6 connectivity to their associated products and services.
IP address allocation bodies such as ARIN and RIPE have been pushing IPv6 adoption for years but it took last year’s dramatic exhaustion of IPv4 addresses to jolt companies into action. IPv6 day was supported by many of the firms taking part in the IPv6 launch later this year, to drum up awareness and see how much disruption there will be when IPv6 connectivity is enabled.
Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NCC said, “Operational experience and measurements on World IPv6 Launch will help content providers and ISPs to identify and rectify any potential problems with delivering services over IPv6.”
Windows 8 To Have Simple Recovery
Microsoft has detailed the options that will be available to recover a crashed PC running Windows 8.
Users will be offered two alternatives when presented with a Windows crash, with options to either refresh or reset their lost machine.
The changes are detailed in a blog post from the firm where the refresh option was described as a way of retaining some work while restoring core OS functions. The other is a full face wipe.
“We’ve built two new features in Windows 8 that can help you get your PCs back to a ‘good state’ when they’re not working their best, or back to the ‘factory state’ when you’re about to give them to someone else or decommission them,” explains Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky in the introductory blog post.
“The strength of this approach is that you start over from a truly clean state, but you still get to keep the things you care about. With that as the basis of the solution, our goal was to make the process much more streamlined, less time-consuming, and more accessible to a broad set of customers.”
Broadly, the two options work as follows. Fully resetting your PC will remove all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC and reinstall Windows, while just refreshing will keep all personal data, Metro style apps, important settings on the PC and reinstall Windows.
The reset option includes features for erasing old data more thoroughly. This involves choosing the “Thorough” option and should help protect more sensitive users, or firms storing official or compliance related information, from having their data exposed through third party refreshes.
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Sprint Finally Gets The iPhone
October 10, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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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.
Mobile Networks Near Capacity
July 23, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Mobile networks in North America are using 80 percent of capacity, with 36 percent of base stations facing capacity constraints, according to a survey by investment firm Credit Suisse.
Networks in other regions also are more than 50 percent utilized, with the global average at 65 percent, Credit Suisse said after surveying carriers around the world. That level of use matches the average “threshold” rate that would trigger the service providers to start buying more network equipment, the report said. Looking ahead, on average the carriers expected their utilization rate to grow to 70 percent within 12 months.
Credit Suisse used the results to predict new sales by makers of cellular equipment, such as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei Technologies. But at a certain level, heavy use of a base station can also affect the mobile experience of individual subscribers. The survey found that 23 percent of base stations worldwide had capacity constraints (defined as a utilization rate over 80 percent during busy hours), while 36 percent in North America were under that kind of pressure.
The North American networks were 72 percent utilized two years ago. The region’s carriers expect the rate to ease back down to that point within two years. North American service providers are likely to buy more equipment soon, because having their networks 74 percent filled is the threshold rate in that region, the survey said.