It’s been a long way since gigahertz were the best way to measure computer processor performance. There are a lot of other factors that help determine how well a CPU will be able to perform a task. But that hasn’t stopped chip foundry TSMC from announcing that its new ARM Cortex-A9 dual core processor can hit clock speeds of 3.1…
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Chip designer ARM has unveiled a new version of the company’s Cortex-A15 design. The ARM Cortex-A15 MP4 Hard Macro is a low power 28nm quad-core chip design that runs at 2 GHz. What sets the “Hard Macro” designs apart from “Soft Macro” is that the soft macro versions offer chip makers more flexibility to customize various aspects of the chip….
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The Raspberry Pi folks have been getting a lot of attention for their $35 PC with an ARM-based processor and support for some open source software. But as the cost of computer components continues to drop, the Raspberry Pi is hardly the only inexpensive PC capable of running Linux. The Mele A1000 is a system that sells for $70 and…
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While it’s nice to imagine what Windows 8 would look like on a tablet like the HP TouchPad, the truth is that you probably won’t be able to install Microsoft’s upcoming operating system on any existing tablets with ARM-based processors. Microsoft has no plans to sell an installable version of Windows on ARM directly to consumers. Instead, if you want…
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The upcoming TI OMAP 5 processor will be one of the first chips designed around the ARM Cortex-A15 architecture. Theoretically it will offer more power than today’s fastest chips, while using less energy. But that’s theory. How does is stack up in practice? Pretty well, if a new demo video from Texas Instruments is anything to go by. The company…
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Over the past few years ARM-based processors have been getting more and more powerful, while chip makers have been working to make x86 chips more power efficient. So it should come as no surprise that we’ll soon see smartphones and tablets with Intel chips. But we may also see laptop and desktop computers with ARM processors one day — or…
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Earlier this month Microsoft and a handful of partners started showing of Windows 8 running on tablet with ARM-based processors. While Windows 8 probably won’t be released to the public until the second half of 2012, CNET reports that an early version Windows 8 for ARM will be available for developers in February. Windows 8 on ARM is reportedly much…
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It’s been a year since Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would run on devices with ARM-based processors as well as computers with x86 chips. But while a Windows 8 developer preview has been available for months, it currently only runs on x86 chips. Today NVIDIA showed off a tablet with a Tegra 3 quad-core processor running Windows 8. We didn’t…
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The PandaBoard ES is a platform aimed at developers that want to write software for phones, tablets and other mobile devices. But basically it’s a tiny, low-cost computer board with a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP 4460 dual core processor, support for 1080p HD video, HDMI output, OpenGL 2.0 graphics, and more. The PandaBoard ES has 1GB of DDR2 memory, a…
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ARM has introduced a new graphics core design which will offer ten times the performance available from the ARM Mali-T400 chips available today. In other words, you get a 1000% graphics performance boost over the chip in the Samsung Glaaxy S II, which is one of the fastest phones available today. The new ARM Mali-T658 design is aimed at pones,…
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Windows 8 will be the first full blown version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system which can run on ARM-based processors as well as x86 chips. But Windows on ARM will be a different experience for many users — because most older Windows apps aren’t compiled to run on ARM chips. In other words, moving forward we’ll probably see key apps…
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Chip designer ARM has introduced a new platform for low power chips that are 20 percent the size of ARM Cortex-A8 processors… and which use only about 20 percent as much power. The new ARM Cortex-A7 processors are designed to power low cost, entry level smartphones and other mobile devices. While ARM says the chips will show up in smartphones…
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