Archos have officially announced their so-called Home Tablets at CeBIT 2010 this week, and there’s good news and bad. The Archos 7 Home Tablet and the Archos 8 digital photo frame each run Android, just like the Archos 5, but they have sluggish ARM9 processors rather than any of the more speedy SoC’s we’ve seen on other tablets lately. Archos’ trick, though, is in pricing: the two devices are €149 ($203), making them reasonably budget friendly.
Just what’s lurking inside Apple’s iPad? We know the company have developed their own SoC, the Apple A4, but so far there’s plenty of mystery around what exactly that chipset entails. Over at ArsTechnica they reckon it’s a single 1GHz Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU (the latter quietly confirmed last week) based on information from multiple sources. In fact, they go on to suggest, the magic of the Apple A4 SoC is not what it brings to the table, but what it leaves out.
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We've already seen ambitious smartbook predictions from ARM CEO Warren East, who suggested his company's processors would grow to occupy 90-percent of the netbook segment, but now analysts ABI Research are throwing some extravagant figures around too. They've predicted 163 million smartbooks shipping by 2015, though they're not limiting their scope to just the QWERTY netbook-style hardware most commonly associated with the term.
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ARM and GlobalFoundries have spilled some details on their latest system-on-a-chip (SoC), based on an ARM Cortex-A9 processor and promising a boost in both battery life and performance. In fact, the two companies reckon systems using the chip will see a 40-percent increase in computing performance, while power consumption will be 30-less and standby times doubled.
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How much does creating a new chip cost? If your guess was "a whole lot" then you're right; according to the NYT this week, Apple could have spent $1bn in developing the Apple A4 that powers the iPad, and that's not even counting the investment in building a factory, which can add another $3bn to the bill.
Processors from ARM end up in all sorts of products from smartphones to automobiles and a myriad of other devices. The company seems to have a processor for just about every need. The latest processor from ARM is the Cortex-M4 that has been unveiled for digital signal control markets.
Like the charming, fey uncle your grandmother warned you against showering with, Apple’s iPad has us confused. Tablets have broached the mainstream and, like CES 2010 last month, this past week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw several more companies show their hand. Each of the chipset companies we spoke to – Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Freescale, Marvell and others – included tablets among the target market for their ARM-based wares, and we played with various concepts, prototypes and mockups, many of which are destined for release within the next twelve months.
ARM has been pushing its slick new Coretex-A9 MPCore symmetric multi core processor for a while now. The ARM processor consumes less power and operates at lower voltages and frequencies than single core processors, while offering increased performance. This makes the device perfect for smartphones and portable electronics.
When it comes to both CPUs and GPUs in the smartphone and feature phone industry, many of the devices out there run hardware from ARM. ARM has been pushing its new Coretex-A9 processors and Mali GPUs for a while. At MWC 2010 ARM and Samsung announced that they are extending their working relationship to bring superior graphics processing to future products.
Symbian has gone open-source, and talk is now of what sort of devices we could see the OS turn up on. According to Symbian Foundation chief executive Lee Williams, particularly likely are Symbian-based tablets; speaking with ZDNet UK, Williams revealed that the Foundation has had several inquiries from companies looking into tablet-style devices running ARM chipsets.
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