Feb 14, 2011

Cypress to add USB 3.0 support to its series of West Bridge controllers

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about a West Bridge before

IF YOU’VE EVER built your own PC you might be familiar with the terms North Bridge and South Bridge, well, Cypress has a third entry which it calls a West Bridge which in a way is similar to Intel’s PCH, except that it’s mainly intended for ARM based solutions. The West Bridge sits between the processor and the USB interface and handles quite a bit of the processing that would otherwise have been done by the SoC and as such can help free up resources and improve battery life.
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Feb 12, 2011

Renesas to demo dual core ARM Cortex A9 SoC at MWC

First with PowerVR SGX MP graphics

RENESAS IS MOVING into a lot of market spaces and its mobile division has announced that it will be showing its new SH-Mobile APE5R ARM Cortex A9 SoC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The SH-Mobile APE5R is the first Cortex A9 SoC to use Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX MP multi-core graphics core and it’ll be interesting to see how powerful it is.
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Feb 10, 2011

Broadcom announces new SoC with baseband chip and HSPA+ modem

Dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor and much much more

OUT OF ALL OF ARM’s partners, Broadcom is the one that so far has been the least competitive in the smartphone market space in terms of its own SoC solutions, but this looks set to change with the introduction of the BCM28150 which is a dual core ARM Cortex A9 SoC with an integrated baseband chip as well as a HSPA+ modem. Another advantage of Broadcom’s solution is that the company has an entire reference platform based around its own components which means that partners can source almost an entire device from Broadcom.
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Feb 9, 2011

Acer launches Nvidia HDMI 3D compatible monitor

Has built in IR transmitter

TO DATE MOST, if not all 3D computer displays have relied on  dual-link DVI connectivity to display the 3D image, but Acer has announced a new model in its line-up called the GN245HQ which will offer 3D Vision support over HDMI, a first for a computer monitor. Acer has also cleverly embedded the IR emitter into the screen bezel which means that the problem of position the USB IR emitter that Nvidia supplies with its 3D glasses is no longer an issue.
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Feb 7, 2011

Texas Instruments unveils the OMAP 5 platform

The ultimate smartphone SoC?

WE’RE STILL WAITING for the first retail devices to arrive powered by TI’s OMAP 4 series of SoC’s but that hasn’t stopped TI from unveiling details about its next generation OMAP 5 family of SoC’s which are set to be manufactured using a 28nm fabrication process and feature not only multi-core processors, but also multi-core graphics. The OMAP 5 series of SoC’s are based on ARMs Cortex A15 MPCore and the PowerVR SGX544-MPx graphics which should offer some very impressive overall performance in the mobile market space.
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Feb 4, 2011

AMD drops Phenom II CPU prices

To make space for recently launched models

AMD’S MAIN WEAPON in its fight against Intel has been pricing and it seems like AMD has decided to further lower its prices, at least for its Phenom II processors which all have been given a price cut recently. Some of it appears to have been done to slot in three recently launched models, while some of the price drops appear to indicate that some models might be phased out sooner rather than later.
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Feb 3, 2011

Intel’s Romley platform will be available for LGA-1356 and LGA-2011

Main difference will be memory support and PCI Express lane count

INTEL’S ROMLEY PLATFORM is set to launch sometime in the second half of this year and it will bring with it a world of confusion in the Xeon market space as Intel will be offering both LGA-1356 and LGA-2011 solutions to its partners. The main difference is that the LGA-1356 platform will support triple channel memory while the LGA-2011 platform will support quad channel memory, but it doesn’t stop there.
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