In fact KitKat advocates low-power always-on functionality, and this is essential for contextual-awareness. Always-on functionality is saving battery life, which seems to be weird at first: if your phone is always-on you would expect it to consume much power… But always-on goes together with screen-off (the screen is a high… Read More
Qualcomm start selling DSP IP core?…
In recent times semiconductor companies have revealed their intentions to license their in-house processor architectures for the first time – IBM want to license their Power CPU architecture, nVidia to license their GPU architecture. Most recently, a rumor has surfed: Qualcomm will license their DSP architecture. We should… Read More
CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core
Eyal Bergman of CEVA announced their latest core yesterday at the Linley Microprocessor Conference. It’s their 4th generation CEVA-XC solution, which is the core of their offering for wireless baseband. It builds on 3 previous generations of CEVA-XC’s that were mainly targeted toward handset applications. This… Read More
Base Stations Move Away From Fixed Architecture DSP
Handsets moved away from fixed architecture DSP some time ago, driven by two main factors. Fixed architecture DSP consumed too much power to get good battery life in the smart-phone era, but the consumer air interface was changing fast: W-CDMA, HSPA, WiMax, 3G, LTE (which is actually a whole ‘spectrum’ of different… Read More
Why Every Smartphone OEM Want to Use Homemade GPU?
Smartphone shipment explosion and continuous growth is attracting always more OEM and chip makers, this is not really surprising, as the wireless market can be identified as the faster growing, and larger electronic segment ever seen. On such a mass market, the real question is “how to differentiate?” Apple is unique; just trying… Read More
The DSP is dead! Long Live the DSP… IP core!
Trying to trace DSP birth as a standard IC product, you come back to the early 80’s, when a certain Computer manufacturer named IBM has asked to a certain Semi-Conductor giant (at that time) named Texas Instruments if they could turn a lab concept, Digital Signal Processor, into a standard product that IBM could buy to TI, like they… Read More
CEVA and ARM Do LTE
If you have purchased a high-end cell-phone or tablet in the last couple of years it probably has LTE, although some carriers try and blur things by showing a symbol like 4G when you are in an area that has LTE despite the fact that your phone does not support it. Don’t you love cell-phone marketing? Talking of which, if a camel … Read More
Smartphone Shipment Explosion Sustained by $50-$75 devices, Mostly in China
Until recently, talking about smartphone incredible shipment growth was understood as shipments of A5 iPhone or Galaxy Note, and this was true. Devices priced at $500 or more are shipping like baguette in Paris, but this fact is only true in Europe, Korea, Japan or USA. Does that means that people living populated countries like… Read More
Bring high end camera image quality to smartphone
We have to go back to 2008 to understand why Super Resolution is desperately needed by smartphone users, expecting to take high quality pictures with their smartphone, at least as good quality as with their camera. It’s in 2008 that smartphone worldwide shipments have surpassed standalone compact camera shipments… and we don’t… Read More
Using Android Multimedia Framework drastically reduces power consumption in mobile
The multiplication of chips capable to run Multimedia processing (sound, image or video) in a mobile device, smartphone or media tablet, like Application Processor (AP), Baseband (BB), Codec or companion chip, each of these embedding one or multiple processor can be seen as a good opportunity to simplify the device architecture…… Read More