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Huawei's first octa-core chip promises faster LTE than its rivals
While MediaTek's trotting its way into the premium smartphone market with an LTE octa-core chip later this year, Huawei's creeping up right behind with its own octa-core offering. Like Samsung's newer Exynos 5 Octa variants, Huawei's new Kirin 920 consists of quad Cortex-A15 plus quad Cortex-A7 CPUs that work simultaneously, as well as a powerful Mali-T628 GPU. But what makes this 28nm chip special is its integrated multi-mode LTE Cat 6 radio, meaning it can offer data speeds of up to 300Mbps on networks that are set up for carrier aggregation. These are already live or being tested in the likes of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Germany.
ARM's eight-core Mali GPUs promise 'dramatic' boost to mobile graphics
The current flagship for ARM's mobile graphics technology is undoubtedly the Galaxy S III, which contains a quad-core Mali 400 GPU and delivers some wild benchmark scores. By the end of this year though, we should see a whole new generation of Malis -- not just a Mali 450 for mid-range handsets, but also the quad-core T604 and the eight-core T658, which are based on ARM's Midgard architecture and are taking forever to come to market. Now, to whet our appetites even further, ARM has just added three more variants of the chip to its roster, which can almost be considered the next-next-generation: the quad-core T624, and the T628 and T678, which are both scalable up to eight cores. The trio's headline feature is that they promise to deliver at least 50 percent more performance with the same silicon area and power draw, with the explicit aim of delivering "console-class gaming," 4K and even 8K video workloads, as well as buttery 60fps user interfaces in phones, tablets and smart TVs. The premium T678 is aimed at tablets specifically, and in addition to allowing up to eight cores also doubles the number of math-crunching ALUs per core, which means that its compute performance (measured in gigaflops) is actually quadrupled compared to the T624. However, there's one other, subtler change which could turn out to be equally important -- read on for more.
