Archive for the Hardware News Category
The A10 processing chip by Allwinner Tech has been making several appearances in the China tablet market and has been causing quite a stir with boastful performance specs. With big names like Ainol, Onda and Teclast adopting the chip for their latest tablet releases, the chip has done well for itself, especially since it claims it can handle 2160p video playback, and out-benchmark Cortex-A8 and -A9 processors. We've recently blogged about Ainol's new NOVO7 tablet - an A10 user - and now we've got the P76 tablet from Teclast, and an upcoming Onda tablet that will also sport the A10 chip. Read more about this after the break.
All three tablets have the same epic spec list that includes, as mentioned, 2160p HD video playback, video decoding of up to a resolution of 3840 x 2160, 2D
We decided to do a little test to see whether or not Ainol's NOVO8 does indeed have a battery life of 4 to 5 hours with WiFi constantly on. For good measure, we turned the brightness up to a realistically bright setting of around 70%, and turned the screen timeout to 'never timeout'. Our results can be found after the break (Or in the title)
We turned the fully charged NOVO8 on at 10:00am and then periodically checked the battery life every 2 hours after that. After two hours - 12:00pm - the battery level showed to be at 51% which was a surprising cut-in-half for just two hours. In terms of what the battery use was: the device standby was at 73%, the display was at 18% and the WiFi was at 11%. We checked again on the fourth hour of turning on the tablet - 02:00pm - which showed th
Some new rumours swirling around pertaining to Marvell's new ARM-based SoC's coming to the market, courtesy of SemiAccurate:
"SemiAccurate’s moles say that Marvell is cooking up an A9/A15 hybrid part, philosophically closer to the A9 on the core, but with a very A15-like memory controller. This likely means a 3-pipe design rather than a 4-pipe, but with >32-bit memory access and virtualization instructions. The new chip should implement the full A15 ISA, so there should be no software compatibility issues, but has less raw grunt than a full A15. At least on paper."
It is speculated that this hybridisation may be to lower the cost at near A15 levels of performance. An interesting question is whether this will impact the tablet market, or will these chips be aimed at laptops a
The spill about Qualcomm coming out with next-generation Snapdragon processing chips has already been... spilled. It now looks like more spillage has taken place from a leaked Qualcomm roadmap showing when we should be expecting the new chips to be released. Qualcomm's MSM8960 Snapdragon chip is shown to be ready for release later on this year. It will bring with it dual cores capable of reaching a clockspeed of 1.7GHz, as well as support for dual-channel 500MHz of memory,3G and 4G connectivity and an Adreno 225 graphics processor capable of 1080p video playback as well as shooting 20-megapixel pictures... in 3D! Good stuff indeed, however all this magnificence must wreak havoc on battery life, and with a constant 4G connection, also your savings. It's still a guessing game as to who wil
With Microsoft's latest OS development for tablets - Windows 8 - covering the software side of slates to come, we needed someone to cover the hardware side. Will that job fall to AMD and their new chipset dubbed Hondo? Perhaps, seeing as the processing chips are due out at the same time Windows 8 gets released. From a leaked image captured by Turkish site Donanimhaber, the Hondo chips are to bring to the table a dual-core processor with a suggested lower "app power" of 2 watts. The 40nm processor will also harness a Radeon HD 6250 graphics chip and can handle 720p video playback as well as DirectX 11 graphics. Heat also doesn't seem to be an issue as the low power chip is stated to be designed for fan-less computers. The leaked info also points to Hondo samples being sent to hardware par
Intel has been working on a next-generation chipset which they're hoping to release when Microsoft releases their Windows 8 operating system. The Atom chip is designed to work in tablets, netbooks and other low-end devices - Windows 8 OS is also designed to run on touchscreen tablets as well as laptops and desktops. Fancy that. The new-generation chip dubbed Cloverview is meant to take over Inte's Atom Oak Trail chip and is the first Atom processor to be built with a 32nm design. Read more after the break.
Seeing as Intel will want Cloverview to compete with the current low-power ARM-based chips, we can safely assume that it will generate less heat and use less power whilst running higher performance graphics than its Atom predecessors. Cloverview won't be taking over all things Atom
We were excited about Freescale's upcoming i.MX6 processing chips after we heard about them, and we still are! They may not be out yet, but we at least get some more information as well as two videos about them. If you're new to the game. the i.MX6 chip series is a line of low power processing chips that contain single, dual and quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 cores with the capability of up to 4.8GHz of total performance. Thanks to ARMDevices who was at the Freescale Technology Forum, we now know that Freescale have tested their quad-core platform - capable of high performance 3D graphics and 1080p HD video playback - on Windows CE and Ubuntu Linex, both of which showed excellent performance - music to our ears! Let's hope Android does better ;). Check out both of the videos after the break.
MasterImage was the master of images at the Computex 2011 event, where they showed off a bunch of glasses-free 3D displays of different sizes - 4.3-, 7- and 10-inches. These sizes are a perfect fit for tablets, smartphones and PMPs, and those are exactly the devices MaserImages are aiming to sell their 3D display screens to. The company was at the event looking for partners who would be interested in implementing the 3D screens into their devices. If a reasonable price can be set, this would make a pretty sweet partnership. Resolution wise, the 4.3- and 7-inch screens come with resolution of 800 x 480. There's also another 7-inch version with 1280 x 800 (no word on the 10-incher though), however the downfall with these screens is the halving of resolution when turned vertical - making th
The Motorola Xoom has just reached new grounds, but before you get misconstrued, it's not all that. The Motorola Xoom has been overclocked before to 1.5GHz, and even to 1.6 last month,and now it has been stretched to 1.7GHz. The figure may be impressive, but actually all this overclocking does is create a somewhat unstable environment within the tablet. This shortcoming from the intention to impress isn't new to the Xoom - a tablet once famous for being the first in the industry to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb and then have its sales figures drop like a hat. Either way, if your brave enough to void your warranty and want to push your Motorola Xoom to the limits then by all means. However, apparently not all units are able to be overclocked to 1.7GHz. Another disappointment.
via tablet-ne
Qualcomm have tooted their horn, announcing that their Snapdragon processing chip - popular among tablets and smartphones - will soon be in around 250 new devices. This is in additional to the already 125 announced Snapdragon powered devices. The announcement of the 250 currently developing Snapdragon tabs was done during this week's Qualcomm Upling event, and is a pretty big achievement for a company that wasn't so well known just a few years ago. Their latest Snapdragon chips can already be found in some of the high-end devices such as the HTC Flyer, Sony's Experia Play smartphone and the upcoming HP TouchPad. As for their next-gen chips, they're expected to be able to run devices sporting Windows 8 as well as linux, Android, webOS and others.
via liliputing
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