We were excited about Freescale's upcoming i.MX6 processing chips after we heard about them, and we still are! They may not be out yet, but we at least get some more information as well as two videos about them. If you're new to the game. the i.MX6 chip series is a line of low power processing chips that contain single, dual and quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 cores with the capability of up to 4.8GHz of total performance. Thanks to ARMDevices who was at the Freescale Technology Forum, we now know that Freescale have tested their quad-core platform - capable of high performance 3D graphics and 1080p HD video playback - on Windows CE and Ubuntu Linex, both of which showed excellent performance - music to our ears! Let's hope Android does better ;). Check out both of the videos after the break.
There are a lot of chips in the Shenzhen tablet market currently. We've got classic ARM9/ARM11-based ones, ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 ones as well. Sometimes it can get a little confusing, especially if you're on the lookout for chips that do something specifically well - you may be willing to accept worse performance in one area for better performance in another. Well, inspired a very useful post by MICDigi, we've decided to compile a brief list of some of the more commonly found chips in Shenzhen tablets, and what their strengths / weaknesses are and some examples of tablets that use them. Without further ado...
Rockchip chips are some of the most common you'll find in low-cost Shenzhen tablets - that is, the classic ARM9-based Rockchip chips (RK2808 and RK2818). The former is es
Charbax managed to capture Meego running on an ARM Cortex-A8-based Freescale i.MX51x processor, likely the 515. While it's not huge news, Charbax does say that it may be one of the first Meego implementations to take advantage of ARM hardware acceleration, which is as much a milestone as the myriad other OS bits and bobs that find their way into the blog-go-round. The operation of the Meego OS does not look as smooth as we have seen it before - it's a bit hitchy and jerky - but perhaps we'll see it ported to other A8 devices in the near future?
via armdevices
Samsung ARM Cortex-A9 Orion processor with Mali-400 graphics - Samsung Galaxy Tab 2?
Freescale i.MX6 series ARM Cortex-A9 information.
Texas Instruments OMAP4-powered devices.
Way more Honeycomb.
Tegra 2 3D edition, clocked at 1.2GHz. Roadmap here.
Qualcomm MSM8660, MSM8260-powered devices.
More Rockchip RK29xx (ARM Cortex-A8) information and powered devices.
HP webOS tablet - Topaz?
LG G-Slate?
Lots and lots of tablets.
Lots and lots of smartphones.
Lots and lots of gadgets.
We can only hope. We'll be gone for a while for Chinese New Year - see you Monday.
Thanks Charbax.
Freescale have announced their i.MX 6 series of SoC containing 4 ARM Cortex A9 cores. Up until now, we had been excited about things like dual-core A9's (eg. Tegra 2) but the i.MX 6 series looks to make one step forward in furthering parallel processing on anything from smartphones to tablets. As you can see from the basic application chart above, the i.MX 6 have been designed from the ground up to be extremely versatile, handling anything from multimedia to 3D to raw processing power. This allows device manufacturers tremendous power/price flexibility all on a unified platform, which of course means drivers too. The savings translate to cheaper development costs, as well as a faster time to the market. We're looking forward to seeing some benchmarks of the i.MX 6 series SoC when samples
The Kinpad I600 is one of the more interesting tablet devices we've seen of late. First and foremost, it's an Android 2.2 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touchpanel and screen resolution of 1024x600. It's powered by the Freescale iMX515 processor, a Cortex A8-based chip clocked at 800MHz. The Freescale processor is in itself impressive, but the I600 also has dedicated AMD graphics, the Z430, which is something we haven't seen in Shenzhen / China market tablets yet. The Z430 features a unified pixel & vertex shader pipeline and is apparently based on the Xbox 360 Xenos GPU. Impressive indeed. What we think this dedicated graphics chip adds is 1080p video playback (as well as 3D graphics acceleration for various apps and games), as the iMX515 processor on its own is yet to prove itse
A8 versus A8 versus ARM11 - we haven't had a good showdown in a while. Today I was fortunate enough to get a Freescale iMX515 Cortex A8 based tablet to play with, and decided to pit it against its half brother, the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3530 Cortex A8 based counterpart, the MIDnite, as well as our latest tablet offering on the MP4 Nation store, the Telepad, powered by the ARM11 TCC8902 processor. Invigorating stuff. The Freescale and TI A8 processors were both clocked at 800MHz while Telepad's Telechips ARM11 CPU comes in clocked at a lower 720MHz - I know, it's not quite a fair test, especially when considering the latter runs Android 2.1, while the former two A8 brethren run Android 2.2. We (attempted) to use 3 benchmarks: Quadrant Standard Edition, Linpack for Android and Qualcom
Raz:
Well if a prize had to be given to the device that looked and felt most like an iPad it would go to this 10.1" tablet. I did like the concept and would be interested in looking into carrying something like this, PROVIDED, that the company changed how the tablet looked, you get zero street cred looking like an iPad clone.
Anyways some things to note, the UI and touch panel worked well, although during the video recording the music app crashed, but it didn't do that before.
The 1ghz Freescale processor was very snappy, but we weren't able to see how well it could load websites. The multitouch worked really nice. The final version will support 3G with a port for your SIM card.
So I will be keeping my eye on this company - they did say that they would be changing
More info and pics of the previously reported Freescale Smartbook have been announced in the flurry of CES press releases.
Looking to combine the best bits of smartphones and notebooks is this concept design from Freescale. It operates as a regular 7 inch tablet but also comes with a QWERTY keyboard docking station for ease of use when not on the move.
More info and pics after the jump.
Currently strictly a concept design gunning to whet appetites of OEMs and ODMs.
What they have so far is a 7 inch WSVGA touch screen powered by a 1GHz i.MX515 processor based on Cortex A8 architecture. It also incudes OpenVG and OpenGL.ES hardware graphic cores and HD video decoding.
Inside is also 512MB of DDR2 RAM, 4-64GB HDD, microSD support, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, USB 2.0 and USB min
Chipmaker Freescale have put some meat on it's chip's bones and come up with their own 7 inch touchscreen Smartbook Tablet.
It’s powered by a system on a chip (SoC) based 1Ghz ARM Cortex A8 design, which runs alongside six co-processors (FPU, DSP, img processing, 2D graphics, 3D graphics and HD video decoder).
The screen comes in resistive or capacitive options and runs at a respectable 1024 x 600 resolution. Connection comes via WiFi-N or 3G and it also has GPS.
Battery life’s a reported 12 hours with WiFi running and varients will be Android-enabled. All this for between $199 and $249 depending on specs.
via ubergizmo
