SoCs
Throughout the world, if there's one universal constant in the smartphone and mobile device market, it's Arm. Whether it's mobile chip makers basing their SoCs on Arm's fully synthesized CPU cores, or just relying on the Arm ISA and designing their own chips, at the end of the day, Arm underlies virtually all of it. That kind of market saturation and relevance is a testament to all of the hard work that Arm has done in the last few decades getting to this point, but it's also a grave responsibility – for most mobile SoCs, their performance only moves forward as quickly as Arm's own CPU core designs and associated IP do. Consequently, we've seen Arm settle into a yearly cadence for their client IP...
Analyzing the iPhone 5 Geekbench Results
While working on our Haswell piece, I've been religiously checking the Geekbench and GLBenchmark results browsers to see if anyone ran either benchmark and decided to tap upload. This...
118 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/16/2012iPhone 5 Memory Size and Speed Revealed: 1GB LPDDR2-1066
Quick analysis of the A6 SoC photos from the iPhone 5 launch event tells us all we need to know about the memory interface, speed and bandwidth of the...
24 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 9/15/2012The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a Custom Apple Core Instead
When Apple announced the iPhone 5, Phil Schiller officially announced what had leaked several days earlier: the phone is powered by Apple's new A6 SoC. As always, Apple didn't...
164 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/15/2012The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 2
We're back! After a false start last week, we have our second podcast. This week Brian Klug, Ryan Smith and myself discussed Thunderbolt, Quick Sync in OS X, Windows...
25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/28/2012Qualcomm's APQ8064 and GLBenchmark 2.5 - MDP/T Results
A month ago Qualcomm invited us to play with their latest mobile development platform, the APQ8064 based MDP/T. For those of you who have trouble following Qualcomm's naming scheme...
9 by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/24/2012Samsung Announces A15/Mali-T604 Based Exynos 5 Dual
Yesterday Samsung officially announced what we all knew was coming: the Exynos 5 Dual. Due to start shipping sometime between the end of the year and early next year...
36 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/10/2012NVIDIA Q2 FY13 Earnings Report: $1.04B Revenue, Tegra Sales Recover
I don't normally comment on earning's calls, but this is something I've been talking a lot about in meetings offline so I decided to write up a short post...
14 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/10/2012ARM Announces 8-core 2nd Gen Mali-T600 GPUs
In our discrete GPU reviews for the desktop we've often noticed the tradeoff between graphics and compute performance in GPU architectures. Generally speaking, when a GPU is designed for...
25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/6/2012Anand Chandrasekher Joins Qualcomm
Qualcomm has been on a hiring roll lately. Not only did it scoop up AMD's Eric Demers, but today Qualcomm announced that Anand Chandrasekher would be joining as CMO...
10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/6/2012GLBenchmark 2.5 Performance on iOS and Android Devices
Earlier today we published our first results using GLBenchmark 2.5, the long awaited update to one of our most frequently used mobile GPU benchmarks. In our first article we...
58 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 7/31/2012GLBenchmark 2.5 Performance on Modern Android Smartphones & Tablets
For quite a while now, GLBenchmark has been a regular test in our smartphone, tablet, and SoC reviews. As GPU performance has steadily increased, GLbenchmark 2.1.x started hitting vsync...
47 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 7/31/2012Qualcomm's Quad-Core Snapdragon S4 (APQ8064/Adreno 320) Performance Preview
If you've been following our SoC related coverage, you'll probably have come across our coverage of Qualcomm's upcoming SoCs in their Mobile Development Platforms (MDPs). It's an interesting way...
35 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 7/24/2012Windows Phone 8 Adds support for Multi Core SoCs, Higher Resolutions, microSD, and NFC
We're at the Windows Phone 8 summit, where Microsoft just made support for a bunch of new WP8 features official. The rumors were true, and the platform is moving...
5 by Brian Klug on 6/20/2012TI Joins the Windows RT Demo Fray
Not one for being left out, TI had a demo of Windows RT running on its OMAP 4470 reference tablet. Microsoft instructed its partners not to show off anything...
14 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/8/2012Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Running Windows RT
Last night we saw NVIDIA running Windows 8 RT via ASUS' Tablet 600, and today we got a glimpse of Qualcomm doing the same. Qualcomm's reference tablet features an...
9 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/5/2012Samsung Galaxy S III Performance Preview: It's Fast
Earlier today Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S III, at the heart of which is Samsung's new Exynos 4 Quad SoC. Fortunately we got a ton of hands on time...
94 by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/3/2012Exynos 4 Quad 1.4 GHz 32nm HKMG Announced for Next Galaxy Smartphone
Just a week before its Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012 event where it will announce "the next galaxy smartphone," Samsung has officially announced what SoC will be inside. The answer...
44 by Brian Klug on 4/25/2012NVIDIA Plots Mobile SoC GPU Performance, Surpassing Xbox 360 by 2014
Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs...
51 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/19/2012Apple's iPad 2,4 also uses 32nm A5 S5L8942 SoC
Through Chipworks, we recently learned that Apple's revised A5 SoC (S5L8942) is built on a 32nm Samsung HKMG process. While its presence in the Apple TV (3rd generation) which...
28 by Brian Klug on 4/11/2012