processors

The past weeks have been great for ARM, the designers of the most-used processors in the mobile and embedded world. From Apple's switch to its own ARM-based Silicon to powering the world's fastest supercomputer, ARM seems poised to become an even bigger threat to Intel than AMD was. Perhaps emboldened by that newfound prestige, the company has decided to stay focused on what it does best and spin off from that other popular IT market, the Internet of Things.

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Apple's official move to its own processors in future Macs and MacBooks has been one of the most-talked topics in tech news for the past weeks even it has been long-rumored anyway. A victory for the ARM CPU architecture and a blow to Intel, Apple's Silicon will have repercussions for everyone involved in the Mac ecosystem in more ways than one. Some of them will be good and some will take time to be accepted. There will also be other with perhaps unseen or at least unsaid consequences, like how the new chips could drastically change the Mac's capabilities in more than just performance.

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Almost everyone who has a smartphone these days has played a mobile game, even those that probably don't remember (or admit) whiling time away in Candy Crush or Disney Emoji Blitz. Most of the time, however, mobile gaming is targeted at a certain consumer class ready to splurge on expensive smartphones with beefed-up hardware, leaving those with entry-level budget phones out in the cold. MediaTek is now promising that it has their back with the launch of the new Helio G35 and Helio G25 made exactly for this tier.

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Apple's decision to ditch Intel in the long run for its own ARM-based silicon was naturally received with mixed reactions and opinions. While the benefits on power efficiency are almost unquestioned, there have naturally been concerns over performance, especially when trying to support Mac software not yet built for the new chips. There will naturally be a need for some sort of CPU emulation, a piece of software formally known as Rosetta. Emulation incurs some performance penalty but if "accidental" benchmarks are any indication, Mac users might have very little to worry about.

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The seemingly unstoppable rise of high-end smartphones seemed to have ground to a halt or at least taken a breather as the entire world finds itself in a very different situation from just six months ago. While expensive smartphones continue to be announced, sales numbers indicate a slight shift in favor of less expensive options, even if they are of the mid-range kind. Perhaps unperturbed by global market trends, Qualcomm is reportedly pushing through its planned new features as well as a new price that consumers will end up shouldering in the long run.

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Apple, as always, made headlines this week with its confirmation that it is indeed moving towards its own ARM-based processors. Of course, it isn't the first major operating system vendor to make such a move, though its one-way journey is more permanent than Microsoft's foray into ARM-based devices. The latter hasn't exactly been a roaring success for a variety of reasons but Qualcomm may soon be giving Microsoft one less reason to blame it on processor performance.

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Smartphones have become as powerful as lower-end PCs but there are definitely some things they still can't do. Heavy graphics, especially for games and visualization, is one of those but the entire graphics ecosystem on mobile is considerably different from their desktop counterparts. Graphics drivers, for example, are often at the mercy of vendor firmware updates, which is why ARM is now proudly announcing a new system that would allow drivers to be updated just like one would update an app.

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It is Apple's time in the spotlight again with WWDC happening this week but it seems that ARM is also having a good PR time as well. Cupertino just unveiled its grand strategy to move its devices to its own ARM-based silicon and now the company behind the most-used mobile chip design is celebrating yet another milestone. A supercomputer in Japan has just ranked as the top supercomputer on three lists and ARM Limited (a.k.a. ARM Holdings) is wasting no time boasting how its chips are behind that rather historical achievement.

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It seems that CPU giant Intel's empire is once again besieged. From critical hardware flaws to Apple's upcoming ARM-based Macs, Intel is slowly but surely being forced to come to terms with a future where it will be forced to rub shoulders with its rivals from all fronts. Even long-time partner Microsoft is cozying up with long-time rival AMD for the former's Surface line of laptops. It's probably not that surprising considering how popular the AMD Surface Laptop 3 apparently was.

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The new rules haven't even been fully implemented yet but it's already affecting the company due to the uncertainty it has suddenly found itself in regarding the phone's most important component. Huawei has now been forced to take stock of its existing inventory of HiSilicon chips and reassess its capability to mass-produce its next batch of smartphones. This, in turn, could force it to delay the production and subsequent launch of the Huawei mate 30 series by at least a month or two.

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Today Qualcomm revealed the "world's first 5G and AI-enabled robotics platform" in the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform. Qualcomm is basically the biggest brand in the tech industry when it comes to processing chips for smartphones, especially when it comes to Android devices. The Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform utilizes a variety of brand collaborations between Qualcomm and some of the biggest "ecosystem players" in robotics.

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AMD today announced that it's expanding its lineup of 3rd-generation Ryzen desktop CPUs with the introduction of the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and the Ryzen 9 3900XT. The new CPUs won't be here until next month, but AMD is revealing some of the specifications for them today. In addition to that, AMD also announced the A520 chipset today, but details on that are still very slim.

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