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Roadmap says transistors will stop shrinking in 5 years
Whether or not Moore's Law on complexity has always held true, you've had one constant in the semiconductor world: chip makers would always find a way to shrink transistors and create more powerful chips without increasing size or power consumption. However, even that one hint of predictability might soon disappear. The Semiconductor Industry Association (which includes the likes of IBM and Intel) has published a roadmap which expects transistors to stop shrinking after 2021. Simply speaking, it might not be financial practical to keep reducing transistor sizes -- companies might not recoup the costs. Instead, they may focus on 3D chips an other technologies that make better use of available space.
MediaTek's 10-core mobile chip hits the market next month
As a believer of the old "quality not quantity" saying, Qualcomm backed away from octa core in favor of just four custom-designed cores for its Snapdragon 820 chipset. MediaTek, being the pioneer of octa-core mobile CPU, simply shrugged and teased its upcoming 10-core, tri-cluster Helio X20 last May. So where is it now? Well, at today's Shenzhen event, MediaTek co-COO and EVP Jeffrey Ju told Engadget that the first Helio X20 devices will finally be hitting the markets next month. To heat things up a little, MediaTek also announced the Helio X25 which is just a faster version of the Helio X20: 2.5GHz instead of 2.3GHz for the Cortex-A72 performance cluster, and 850MHz instead of 780MHz for the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. This will also be getting to consumers' hands soon after the Helio X20, according to the exec.
Qualcomm's new chips will power up smartwatches, mid-range phones
Look inside just about any Android Wear smartwatch (plus a few running alternative OSes, no less) and you'll find one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400-series chips thrumming away inside. The company's stranglehold on wearable gadget processors is pretty damned thorough, and it just might stay that way thanks to a new chip — the Snapdragon Wear 2100 — that was announced earlier today.
Samsung is making Qualcomm's latest mobile chip
Samsung says it's making new Exynos processors with low-power 14nm chips -- which is no surprise. What is, however, is that the company is also in charge of building Qualcomm's (maker of Snapdragon) latest chips with the same process. Samsung's FinFET 3D structures bump up both performance and reduce power use, which is what makes it ideal for the tiny processors embedded in smartphones. Samsung adds that its second-generation chips improve processor speed by up to 15 percent, and reduce power use by the same amount. Both its homemade Exynos, as well as Qualcomm's chips, have made appearances in Galaxy S phones, but this is the first time Samsung has announced that it would also be making its rivals' chip -- specifically the Snapdragon 820 that's being baked into smartphones now.
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Amazon is selling its own processors now, too
Amazon's come a long way since its humble beginnings as an online book store. It sells everything from groceries to its own Kindle and tablet hardware, runs streaming services complete with original shows, and has a huge cloud-computing business among other interests. And now Amazon's started pushing its own line of processors, plunging its finger into yet another pie. You won't find its ARM-based "Alpine" chips among the T-shirts and homeware on Amazon's online store, of course. They are being sold directly to manufacturers and service providers through subsidiary Annapurna Labs, a chip designer Amazon acquired early last year.
Qualcomm teases its chip for drones with autonomous navigation
We've known about Qualcomm's drone ambitions for a few months now, but it looks like the company is ready to demo the goods. Ahead of CES next week, the chipmaker teased features of its Snapdragon Flight drone platform. If you'll recall, Qualcomm is aiming to do for drones what its done for phones. And that starts with putting camera and communications tech on the same board. Perhaps most notably, Snapdragon Flight offers and autonomous navigation mode. This means when you're done filming, you can push a button and the UAV will return to the launch pad, avoiding any objects that block its path.
Researchers show off a working light-based processor
The year has been chock-full of scientific breakthroughs, but the University of Colorado is determined to finish 2015 with a bang. Its researchers have created what they say is the first full-fledged processor to transmit data using light instead of electricity. The design isn't entirely photonic, but its 850 optical input/output elements give it the kind of bandwidth that make electric-only chips look downright modest -- we're talking 300Gbps per square millimeter, or 10 to 50 times what you normally see. The key was finding a way to reuse existing conventional processes to put optics in places where regular circuitry would go.
Loyal robot dog waits for you to walk through the door
WowWee, a smart toy company, has unveiled a robotic dog with blue-green LED eyes. The dog, aptly called CHiP (short for Canine Home Intelligent Pet), sits with the tap of a button, picks up your presence in the room via bluetooth and plays fetch. The sensor-loaded pup comes with a toy-watch looking wristband that allows it to pick up your whereabouts. When you're happy with your "pet's" response, you can press down a thumbs up on the wristband as a sign of approval -- it's the digital equivalent of a belly rub.
ARM's latest design brings 64-bit processors to smartwatches
It's no longer hard to find 64-bit processors in smartphones. In smartwatches, though, they're still a rarity -- and ARM wants to change that with its new Cortex-A35 processor design. The architecture promises the most energy-efficient 64-bit mobile chips yet, sipping 32 percent less power than the mid-range A53 even as it outruns the Cortex-A7 it's meant to replace (6 to 40 percent faster). It's extremely scalable, too. You can build full-fledged quad-core chips for entry-level smartphones, but you can also strip things back to make tiny chips for watches and activity trackers.
Heartbeat chip tests medicine based on your natural rhythms
Scientists can simulate organs on chips when testing medicine, but mimicking your natural rhythm is another matter -- it's hard to know if those drugs will behave properly under the stresses of your body. That won't be a problem when the University of Michigan's newly developed testing chip comes into play. The device uses microscopic, gravity-powered fluid channels to replicate heartbeats and other natural flows (such as brain signals) when testing chemicals. You'll know if that treatment works properly when the patient's heart is racing, for example. And unlike previous attempts at emulating heartbeats, you don't need to stick around pumping fluid yourself -- you can conduct long-term tests that reflect what would happen in a real body over time.
MediaTek's Helio P10 offers octa-core and faster LTE on the cheap
It's only been half a month since MediaTek announced a 10-core mobile processor, the Helio X20, as its flagship product for next year, but the company is already prepping a slightly lesser model to stay true to its roots. Meet the Helio P10, the first member of the "premium performance" family (while the X family is for "extreme performance"). For the CPU alone, this 28nm SoC sits somewhere in between the X10 -- the one that's inside the HTC One M9+ -- and the X20 as it has eight 64-bit Cortex-A53 cores that go up to 2GHz. It's obviously not a proper powerhouse given the lack of Cortex-A57 cores, but that should be good news for your device's battery.
Yes, 10-core smartphones will be a thing in 2016
When MediaTek first launched an octa-core mobile processor back in late 2013, many folks -- including Qualcomm -- called it a gimmick, but said feature has since become quite popular amongst device manufacturers, to the point where Qualcomm eventually had to come up with its very own octa-core offerings. Just to stay one step ahead of others, MediaTek is now prepping the launch of a deca-core aka 10-core chip dubbed the Helio X20, which will succeed the octa-core Helio X10 (MT6795) that's already powering HTC's Asia-only One M9+ plus several upcoming Chinese flagship phones. MediaTek is sampling its new chip in Q3, and the first commercial devices to use it will arrive as early as end of this year.
CHIP is a $9 Raspberry Pi killer
The Raspberry Pi was definitely a game changer when it hit shelves at only $35. But CHIP is hoping to make the Pi look positively pricey by comparison. The Kickstarter campaign has already blown way past its $50,000 goal. In fact, at the time of this writing its approaching $500,000. Like the Pi, CHIP is a fully functional computer. The tiny board is home to a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, all of which power a full-fledged (if light-weight) Linux desktop. Even more impressive is that there's both WiFi and Bluetooth on board. It's mostly aimed at tinkerers and DIYers, hence the I/O pins waiting for your attention, but you could certainly use it as an inexpensive general purpose computer... so long as you're not particularly demanding.
Basics of quantum teleportation now fit on a single chip
Until now, quantum teleportation (that is, sending quantum data from one place to another) has required a room-filling machine. That's not going to usher in a brave new era of quantum computing, is it? However, a team of British and Japanese researchers has shrunk things down to a much more reasonable size. They've stuffed the core optical circuits for quantum teleportation into a single silicon chip that's just slightly longer than a penny -- in contrast, an experimental device from 2013 was nearly 14 feet long. While scientists built the chip using "state-of-the-art nano-fabrication," it should be more practical to make than its ancestors, which took months.
AMD's next laptop processor is mostly about battery life
Intel isn't the only chip giant championing battery life over performance this year. AMD has revealed Carrizo, a processor range that's focused heavily on extending the running time of performance-oriented laptops. While there will be double-digit boosts to speed, there's no doubt that efficiency is the bigger deal here. The new core architecture (Excavator) is just 5 percent faster than its Kaveri ancestor, but it chews up 40 percent less energy at the same clock rate -- even the graphics cores use 20 percent less juice.
This WiFi chip can 'steer' signals to reach distant rooms
Everyone gets WiFi issues every now and then, some more severe than others, prompting companies like Eero to conjure up possible solutions. A San Diego company called Ethertronics believes its new "active antenna" chip originally developed for cellphones can solve slow WiFi connections, though. Even better, the company says the EtherChip can extend your connection's range and make sure there's decent signal throughout your house even without the use of boosters. That chip, which uses "active steering algorithms," creates multiple signals around the antenna and chooses the best one to use for each device connecting to it.
NVIDIA's next-gen X1 mobile chipset: a closer look at the numbers
Earlier tonight, NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang officially pulled back the curtain on the Tegra X1 -- a next-generation mobile powerhouse of a chipset that's also the first to offer a teraflop of processing power. It's going to play a crucial role in the company's automotive future, but the mobile nerds reading this might be a little more interested in how fast the X1's going to make our gadgets. Thankfully, NVIDIA pulled us aside for a fast-and-furious benchmarking session that gave us a better idea of what to expect when X1s start trickling into the wild.
Wireless chip cures your staph infection then dissolves away
As bacteria get more resistant to antibiotics, researchers need to get more creative to clear them out. Researchers from the Tufts University and UIUC have definitely done that with a chip implant that can kill a localized staph infection with heat, then dissolve away. It consists of a silk substrate with a magnesium heating element that's activated by a wireless transmitter, raising the temperature enough to kill surrounding bacteria. The treatment time can be controlled for different applications, and the whole thing is reabsorbed into your body in a couple of weeks.
New smartphone chip will beam high-definition holograms as early as 2015
Just imagine: a smartphone that projects 3D holograms into thin-air. If you can wait until the end of next year, and if you can believe the claims being made by a well-funded company called Ostendo, then your next handset could be capable of just that. Thanks to breakthroughs by the Californian display startup, 5,000ppi projectors the size of Tic Tacs are now powerful enough to control the color, brightness and angle of individual beams of light across one million pixels. Just one chip is said to deliver a usable image, but adding additional chips provides scope for even more complex and detailed images. The Wall Street Journal was treated to a demo involving six chips which beamed green dice spinning in the air and noted how "consistent" the motion appeared, irrespective of where it was viewed from.
Broadcom's new chip lets your phone use any wireless charging standard
Wonder why only a handful of mobile devices support wireless charging? It's partly because the standards are horribly fragmented: companies have to choose between technologies like PMA, Rezence and Qi, and it's not clear which of those will last. Broadcom might put the issue to bed with its new (and awkwardly titled) BCM59350 chip, though. The hardware lets gadgets charge using any existing wireless technology -- you won't have to hunt for specific charging pads. It can also handle up to 7.5W of power instead of the usual 5W, so your gear might charge faster than it would using old-fashioned wires.
