Feb 16, 2011

CUPP Computing could revolutionize the notebook market

Instant on, instant OS switching and dual platforms in one

EARLIER TODAY WE had a chance encounter with a Norwegian company called CUPP Computing at the MWC in Barcelona and what they showed us and told us has the potential of changing how we use notebooks. The crazy thing is that it has taken them no less than six years to get to the point where they can openly talk about what they’ve developed and in many ways it’s so simple that we’re amazed that no-one else has thought about it already.
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Feb 16, 2011

Apical could revolutionize the display market

Does dynamic contrast the right way

IF YOU’VE EVER watched a piece of video, no matter the source or quality, on a handheld device, tablet or notebook, well heck, even on a desktop or TV in your home, you’ll have run into one problem that just about every LCD screen suffers from, poor contrast ratio. We bumped into a company at the MWC called Apical that might just be about to fix this problem for good, as they’ve worked out a very different way of improving the contrast ratio compared to current solutions.
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Feb 14, 2011

Cypress to add USB 3.0 support to its series of West Bridge controllers

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about a West Bridge before

IF YOU’VE EVER built your own PC you might be familiar with the terms North Bridge and South Bridge, well, Cypress has a third entry which it calls a West Bridge which in a way is similar to Intel’s PCH, except that it’s mainly intended for ARM based solutions. The West Bridge sits between the processor and the USB interface and handles quite a bit of the processing that would otherwise have been done by the SoC and as such can help free up resources and improve battery life.
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Feb 14, 2011

Marvell takes a leaf out of Intel’s book, announces software

Nothing to do with antivirus or security

TODAY AT THE Mobile World Congress, Marvell announced that it has followed Intel into the world of software, although this is a very different move than those of Intel in the past. Marvell has purchased a company called Kinoma Inc which has developed what is something we have quite hard to put a name to, but it’s sort of apps inside an app with a custom UI.
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Feb 13, 2011

Nokia announces that it’s working hard, on something

MWC 2011: No Windows Phone 7 handsets on display

EARLIER TONIGHT LOCAL time we wasted about two hours of our life listening to Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop explain in some detail, although by no means in any specific terms, as to why Nokia decided to go down the Windows Phone 7 route. Pretty much every journalist at the Mobile World Congress has turned up, as everyone expected Nokia to at least show off its first Windows Phone 7 handset, but alas, it was not to be.
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Feb 12, 2011

Renesas to demo dual core ARM Cortex A9 SoC at MWC

First with PowerVR SGX MP graphics

RENESAS IS MOVING into a lot of market spaces and its mobile division has announced that it will be showing its new SH-Mobile APE5R ARM Cortex A9 SoC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The SH-Mobile APE5R is the first Cortex A9 SoC to use Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX MP multi-core graphics core and it’ll be interesting to see how powerful it is.
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Feb 10, 2011

Broadcom announces new SoC with baseband chip and HSPA+ modem

Dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor and much much more

OUT OF ALL OF ARM’s partners, Broadcom is the one that so far has been the least competitive in the smartphone market space in terms of its own SoC solutions, but this looks set to change with the introduction of the BCM28150 which is a dual core ARM Cortex A9 SoC with an integrated baseband chip as well as a HSPA+ modem. Another advantage of Broadcom’s solution is that the company has an entire reference platform based around its own components which means that partners can source almost an entire device from Broadcom.
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