Whether or not Barnes and Noble liked it enough to copy it, Spring Design’s Alex prototype dual-display ebook reader is certainly nifty enough to capture our interest. MaximumPC had a chance to go hands-on with the Alex, which has a 6-inch e-ink screen up top and a 3.5-inch color capacitive touchscreen underneath for control and navigation, as part of a Marvell demonstration for the company’s new ARMADA 166E SoC.
Given that most of the iPhone 3G S’ new magic is hidden inside the casing, not on show, it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting teardown tips ever since its announcement. RapidRepair are the first to take a pristine iPhone 3G S and crack it open, having queued up outside the Orange Boutique in Paris earlier on today.
Intel have bought embedded software specialists Wind River Systems for $884m, in a deal that will see the firm assist in the development of Mobile Internet Devices and other non-traditional computing. Wind River are perhaps best known in open-source circles for their Android distribution; however the company also has its own OS, VxWorks, a real-time multicore operating system.
NEC have developed a 32Mb MRAM chip that, thanks to the company’s efforts to miniturize the control circuits, allows 73-percent of a memory macro’s area to be allocated to memory cells. The MRAM chip, which is intended for SoC (System-on-Chip) products such as those found in embedded and mobile devices, is also compatible with asynchronous SRAM.
The current range of Geode chips may be the final AMD develop, according to company spokesperson Phil Hughes, with AMD focusing on more mainstream chips rather than the ultra-low-power market. Geode is a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) product, with an x86 processor core, a graphics core and other components on one single chip, with the latest Geode LX running at up to 600MHz and requiring between 0.9W and 5W. It’s used in the OLPC XO laptop, among other things, suggesting that the One-Laptop-Per-Child project may have to look elsewhere for the core of their replacement XO-2 notebook.
Cable subscribers, especially the Verizon folks should be fairly familiar with MoCA (multimedia over Coax Alliance) technology as networking platform to stream multimedia though coaxial cable. No? How about the Zeevee box that is capable of livecasting any internet-based video from PC-to-Tv with similar technology? If we are getting there, here’s another piece of MoCA-based SoC (System-oc-Chip) invention from Broadcom to take on industry’s first HD STB devices piggybacking coax cable infrastructure into a whole-home media distribution network.
ASUS today demonstrated a prototype laptop with dual computing, with the trackpad replaced with a touchscreen that can be used to boot into a low-power system. The notebook can be used as normal, or alternatively media, email, RSS, messaging and other functions can be accessed via the secondary system.
If you’ve paying attention to the HDMI gimmick, you probably heard of HDMI CEC that promises to operate basic controls of your home audio video components connected via HDMI cables with just one remote. Some of those are known as Sony BRAVIA’s Theatre Sync, LG’s SimpLink or EZ Sync from Panasonic; much like some manufacturer advertises the IEEE link with Denon link or Sony’s I.link. Those traditional CEC feature devices require a separate CEC controller for its HDMI transmitter but Analog Devices looks to offer CE makers with much simpler solution and industry’s first on-chip CEC from its ADV7510 HDMI transmitter.
Coming this CES 2009, Samsung may showcase its 2009 line of Blu-ray players with Broadcom’s BCM7601 Blu-ray SoC chipset with smaller footprint and energy efficient 65 nanometer processor for the supports of Blu-ray, DVD, online content playback and HDMI 1.3 protocol.
Last week we took a peep at the impressive Sigma Design SMP 8664, we have no doubt the feature-rich SoC is outstanding with potential to dominate next generation IPTV, IP cable set-top boxes and Blu-ray players. What didn’t get mentioned was the multi-core media processor also boasts the frustrating Blu-ray loading time; on par with PS3 at last!
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