processors

Apple will soon be contracting with GlobalFoundries in the backwoods of New York to have them produce A-series logic chips for iPhones and iPads, GlobalFoundries sources close to the the Albany Times Union have tipped. This represents a major expansion on the part of Apple to include more companies in its chip manufacturing, all of which it outsources. GlobalFoundries will be added to Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) as Apple's A-series chip suppliers.

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Intel has been trying to compete in the mobile world with its own processors from the Atom line. The problem Intel has run into is that it's chips are typically not as power efficient as ARM offerings meaning devices using Intel hardware often lack the battery life needed to compete in today's market. Intel has tried for years to pare down the power usage of its chips with varying degrees of success.

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The iPhone 5s beat out the LG G2 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 in Which? magazine's latest independent speed test of top-performing smartphones. Using a phone simulation program called Geekbench, the test found that the iPhone outperformed the competition in both single-core and multi-core performance benchmarks. Notably, the S4 slipped to third place after having scored top honors in June of this year.

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This week at an event in Montreal, NVIDIA showed off the high-powered demo software called Faceworks (previously working on NVIDIA Titan processors for PC) working on the next-generation mobile-aimed processor Project Logan. This processor will almost certainly be re-named Tegra 5 as each "Project" codename has been re-named "Tegra #", and what we've seen here is an ultra high-powered graphics-intensive beast of a demo on it running just as smoothly as we've seen it run on some of the most powerful graphics processors available from NVIDIA for desktop machines.

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Earlier today, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich made the company's third-quarter earnings call, revealing additional information during the time including word that the Broadwell chip has been delayed a quarter. In addition to that, the executive also talked about the Bay Trail chips, detailing their sizable arrival in the next handful of weeks.

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The team responsible for bringing on next-generation innovation to Qualcomm have initiated an oddity by the name of Qualcomm Zeroth. These processor units are "brain-inspired computing" made real, pushing the limits of what it means for a bit of hardware to anticipate your needs and share our perception of the world naturally. Qualcomm's Research and Development teams have been working on architecture here that they say "breaks the traditional mold" my mimicking the human brain and nervous system.

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Back on the 2nd of October, a bit of buzz was generated at the hands of Qualcomm senior vice president and chief marketing officer Anand Chandrasekher with regard to Apple's 64-bit A7 chip. He suggested at the time that "there's a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7," going on to say that this implementation was a "marketing gimmick." Today Qualcomm has stepped forward to correct Chandrasekher's suggestion that "there's zero benefit a consumer gets from that."

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As the iPhone 5s hits the public, the innards begin to be torn down in turn by the likes of parts groups and repair shops the world over. Today the folks at Chipworks and ifixit have confirmed a set of hardware manufacturers that are, indeed, behind Apple's next-generation processor architecture. What they've discovered thus far is two key companies: Samsung made the A7 chip while the M7 motion coprocessor was made by NXP.

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Supposing you were more than excited about the announcement by Apple this past week that their next-generation Apple A7 chip and iOS 7 brought on 64-bit support for processing, it may come as a shock that Android already has such capabilities. In fact, because Android is based on Linux, it's had the ability to work with 64-bit processing for a long, long time. Word straight Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin suggests that there isn't even any "special development process" that has to be done for Android to handle 64-bit processing power - it just works.

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With the introduction of the iPhone 5S this week Apple showed off the new A7 chip, this chip ready to work side-by-side with a new piece of processing architecture called the M7 Motion coprocessor. This piece of technology is set to sit first in the iPhone 5S and eventually spread to other Apple devices, continuously measuring motion data on its own to save the rest of the device hard-earned energy. You'll have processing of accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass data inside this piece of technology, enabling health and fitness applications galore.

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Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processors have thus far been of a variety that allows for four of the eight cores to be used at one time. This will no longer be the reality beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, however, with Samsung announcing that with the use of Heterogeneous Multi-Processing the Exynos 5 Octa will be able to use all eight cores at once.

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It would appear that the folks at Intel are not giving up - by any means - on their ventures into the smartphone and tablet universe as a roadmap of processor architecture leaks today. This selection of next-generation hardware will be used in Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Android 4.2 devices, leaving Windows RT in the dust (not that Intel was all that excited about the platform in the first place, as it were). It all begins with a suggestion from Digitimes, Taiwan-based newspaper sources speaking up on two new tablet platforms Cherry Trail and Willow Trail, both of which will come in with 14nm processes.

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