Earlier today our brethren over at Engadget Chinese got to hang out with Huawei Device chairman Richard Yu, who was kind enough to inform us that his company will release a HiSilicon K3V3 chipset -- the follow-up to the current quad-core K3V2 -- in the second half of this year. What's more, much like NVIDIA's upcoming Tegra 4, the new platform will be based on the more powerful Cortex-A15 ARM architecture instead of Cortex-A9. Yu also hinted that the K3V3 will be featured in the successors to the Ascend D2 and the Ascend Mate, but our guess is that we won't be seeing those at MWC next month. We shall tickle the man live on stage for more answers this Thursday.
Samsung's brand new ARM A15-based Chromebook is now available direct from Google at the Play store. The $249 WiFi only laptop was already available to pre-order through Amazon, but now you can go straight to the source, and Mountain View promises to have one of the light-weight machines in your hands within 3-5 business days. If you're more interested in the 3G-equipped version of the 11.6-incher, you'll still have to take your business to Amazon for now. Though, there's still no word on when the $329 laptop will be released. To order this affordable web-browsing machine now, hit up the source.
ARM-powered Chromebook lands at Play store for $249 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google really impressed us in San Francisco here today with its 11.6-inch ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. The $249 laptop is 0.8-inches (20mm) thin and weight only 2.43 pounds (1.1kg). It features a 11.6-inch 1366 x 768-pixel matte display, a full-size keyboard, a button-less trackpad and a 30Wh battery for 6.5+ hours of operation. Specs include a fanless dual-core A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (5250) SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in flash storage, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth. There's a full-size SD card reader and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (with mic support) on the left, plus the power input, HDMI output, USB 2.0 port, USB 3.0 connector and SIM slot (currently unused) in back.
First impressions? This is a solid machine -- build quality and materials are fantastic for the price. It's also pleasantly thin and light, a boon for people who are used to carrying a laptop around every day. We're happy with the display which is bright and crisp. Viewing angles could use some improvement, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better laptop screen at this price. The keyboard and trackpad feel great (we're coming from an 11-inch Core i7 MacBook Air), and two-finger scrolling works like a charm. Performance is somewhere between the original Atom-based Chromebooks and the current Celeron-equipped Series-5 model. The system didn't have any issues playing back 1080p content in YouTube, but we didn't get a chance try Hulu or NetFlix.
Ultimately, this is a phenomenal device for the price. If you're used to working in the cloud, you're basically getting 80 percent of the entry-level MacBook Air experience for a quarter of the price. Factor in the Google Now integration and 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years and this latest Chromebook is a winner. Check out the gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.
Continue reading Hands-on with Google's $249, ARM-based Chromebook (update: video)
Filed under: Laptops, Samsung, Google
Hands-on with Google's $249, ARM-based Chromebook (update: video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google just launched the latest iteration of its Chrome OS-based laptop here in San Francisco -- the $249 (or £229, for those in the UK) 11.6-inch Samsung Chromebook. It's ARM-based (fanless), 0.8-inches thick, weighs only 2.43 pounds, runs 6.5+ hours on battery, boots in under 10 seconds and supports 1080p video playback. Pre-orders start today at Amazon and PC World, and the laptop includes Google Now integration using Google Drive as a transport and comes with 100GB of free storage for two years. It will be available for sale on the Play Store and featured prominently at retailers like Best Buy, and naturally, we're expecting this one to make a bigger splash than prior models based on the bargain bin price alone.
Under the hood, there's a dual-core A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (5250) SoC, 2GB RAM, 16GB of built-in flash storage, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth, all of which should act to give this Chromebook a lot more oomph compared to slower, earlier models. Other specs include a 1366 x 768 native screen resolution, a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 socket, combo headphone / mic jack, an SD card slot and a "full-size Chrome keyboard." Hit up the links below for the nitty-gritty, or hop on past the break for a promo vid.
Update: Our hands-on with the new Chromebook is live!
Google launches 11.6-inch ARM-based Samsung Chromebook: $249, ultrathin, 6.5-hour battery, 1080p video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Unsurprisingly, Apple left us in the dark regarding some specifics of the iPhone 5 upon its release. Thankfully, the good folks over at Anandtech have done a bit of digging into those numbers you see bordering Apple's Apple A6 SoC, definitively figuring out that Cupertino's latest phone packs in a total 1GB of Samsung-sourced memory. The site clocks the DRAM inside at 1,066Mhz, noting that it's comprised of "two 512MB dies in a dual-channel LPDDR2 package with 32 bits per channel." Further, Anandtech lists the the speed of the iPhone 5's memory at 8,528MB/sec -- an ample 33 percent boost over the 6,400MB/sec rating for the RAM in the iPhone 4S, but well below the 12,800 MB/sec needed to drive the new iPad's bandwidth-hungry screen resolution.
Beyond that, the site believes that the A6 is Apple's first truly in-house creation, as it's using math units too new to be found in a ARM Cortex-A9 architecture (like the A5 or A5X) but reportedly isn't a match for the soon-to-be-released Cortex-A15. If true, the implication is significant -- it suggests Apple is taking the more aggressive path of a chip designer like Qualcomm and custom-tailoring large parts of its processor designs to get the speed it wants on a more exacting schedule. That's a quick summation of the details; hit up the source links below if you want the explanation in full geek speak.
Jon Fingas contributed to this post.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Anandtech: Apple iPhone 5 features 1GB of RAM, A6 is a custom SoC originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Think those are some pretty slick graphics in your Galaxy S III? Samsung's latest smartphone packs some mighty graphics prowess of its own, thanks to the Mali-400 MP GPU, but once you spend a few minutes with the Mali-T604, the company's next-generation chipset, the improvements become quite clear. After seeing the Mali-T604 in action, as we did at SIGGRAPH today, the capabilities leave us hopeful for the future, and perhaps feeling a bit self-conscious about the silicon currently in our pockets. The reference device on hand was operating in sync with a variety of unnamed hardware, protected from view in a relatively large sealed box. We weren't able to squeeze many details out of ARM reps, who remained mum about the demo components, including clock speed, manufacturer and even fabrication size. What we do know is that we were looking at a quad-core Mali-T604 and dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor, with a fabrication size in the range of "28 to 40 nanometers" (confirming the exact size would reveal the manufacturer). Clock speed is also TBD, and the early silicon on demo at the show wasn't operating anywhere close to its top end.
In order to experience the T604, we took a look at three demos, including Timbuktu 2, which demonstrates elements like self shadowing and depth of field with OpenGL ES 3.0, Hauntheim, which gives us an early look at physics simulation and HDR lighting with OpenCL, and Enlighten, which rendered silky smooth real-time illumination. You can see all of the demos in action after the break, and you can expect T604-equipped devices to make their debut beginning later this year -- ARM says its working with eight manufacturers to get the licensed tech to market as early as Q3.
Filed under: Cellphones, Displays, Gaming, Tablet PCs
ARM's Mali-T604 makes official debut, we get a first look at the next-gen GPU (hands-on video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It's pretty much a year to the day that we reported the possibility of a quad-core Cortex-A15 from ARM, and look what just came across the wire! It's the Cortex-A15 Hard Macro -- the first design from ARM we're aware of that packs four A15 cores. The Hard Macro edition is of particular interest as it aims to help manufacturers bring products to market more quickly and at a lower cost. The chip variant runs at 2GHz, with performance of over 20,000 DMIPS if you were wondering. Notably, it operates with the same power usage of the A9 hard macro, which should mean it's got good efficiency credentials, and it's the first in the family to be based on 28nm process. There's no indication where we might see this turning up, but with the firm spilling the full details at the IEEE Symposium later this week, we're sure we'll find out soon enough.
Continue reading ARM announces new quad-core Cortex-A15 Hard Macro variant
ARM announces new quad-core Cortex-A15 Hard Macro variant originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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