Samsung to outline 8-core big.LITTLE ARM processor in February

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/samsung-to-outline-8-core-big-little-arm-processor-in-february/

Samsung's processor design team has been on a roll with fast chips this year with the Exynos 4 Quad and Exynos 5 Dual. Based on its agenda for the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, that momentum isn't about to stop. A company presentation at the event on February 19th will delve into a new heterogeneous, 8-core processor that relies on ARM's concept of big.LITTLE computing: one half is a quad-core, 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A15 that will do all the heavy lifting, while the other is a quad 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 that takes over in quieter moments. We don't know much more about the chip beyond the expected 28-nanometer manufacturing process, but it's easy to see a mobile chip that's fast without having to consume much energy in its downtime. Most of the mystery surrounds where Samsung will launch the processor first, rather than what it can do: the big.LITTLE chip would be most valuable in a smartphone, but a potentially large size could relegate it to tablets early on.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, Samsung

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Via: EETimes, GSMArena

Source: ISSCC (PDF)

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Oppo's Ulike 2 boasts 5MP front camera, clearly made for self-portrait addicts like you

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/oppo-ulike-2-u705t/

Hold up! Oppo's not quite done with teasing just yet for the day. The company's Sina Weibo account has quietly announced the Ulike 2, a white 4.5-inch phone designed with ladies in mind: not only does it have a common eight-megapixel main camera on the back, but there's also a staggering five-megapixel front-facing imager with beautification features (like face slimming, skin whitening, skin smoothing and more) to keep the self-portrait addicts busy. Other specs include a gapless 960 x 540 LCD (with 2.2mm-thick bezel), 1GB RAM, 16GB built-in storage, micro-SIM slot, a 2,020mAh battery, and TD-SCDMA radio for China Mobile's network. There's no telling how much this Android 4.0 phone will hurt your wallet, nor is there any official information on the underlying processor, but we shall find out when it hits the Chinese market on December 19th, if not at the Find 5's launch event on the 12th.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Oppo

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Kindle Fire HD 8.9 Teardown: A Samsung Tablet By Another Name?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5962075/kindle-fire-hd-89-teardown-a-samsung-tablet-by-another-name

With its little brother having already spilled its guts, it was always going to be interesting to see how the new 9-inch Fire compared. Turns out it owes an awful lot to Samsung.

Powerbook Medic has torn the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 apart for the world to peer inside. It seems Samsung has done well out of the tablet, as it's supplying—at the very least—the display, RAM, and flash memory. The processor is courtesy of Texas Instruments, though.

One weird finding is that the battery is actually a split unit: it uses two separate cells, joined by a battery controller board, to provides its rather weedy 6000MAH 22.2wh power source. That's not particularly common, nor is it obvious why it's been done—space, perhaps.

Elsewhere, the teardown contains lots of nerdish findings, but there's one take-home message worth listening to: the device seems fairly easy to repair, especially the screen. [Powerbook Medic]

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Simulated Brain Ramps Up To Include 100 Trillion Synapses

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-11/world%E2%80%99s-fastest-supercomputer-simulates-100-trillion-synapses-many-human-brain

IBM is developing a cognitive computing program under a DARPA program and just hit a major high.

The Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently crowned world champion of supercomputers, just simulated 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections among them--the most powerful brain simulation ever. IBM and LLNL built an unprecedented 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores, which are an IBM-designed computer architecture that is designed to work like a brain.

IBM was careful to say it didn't build a realistic simulated complete brain-- "Rather, we have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von-Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture," IBM researchers say in an abstract (PDF) of their new paper. It meets DARPA's metric of 100 trillion synapses, which is based on the number of synapses in the human brain. This is part of DARPA's cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE).

To do it, IBM used its cognitive computing chips, which the company unveiled last year. They are designed to recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses. More than 2 billion of these cores were divided into 77 brain-inspired regions, with gray matter and white matter connectivity, according to IBM. The gray matter networking comes from modeling, and the white matter networking comes from a detailed map of c! onnectio ns in the macaque brain. The combined total 530 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses ran 1,542 times slower than real time--actually quite fast, in computing terms.

The ultimate goal is a computer that works like a brain, and can analyze information in real time from multiple sources. Under SyNAPSE, it would also be able to rewire itself dynamically in response to its environment, just like real brains do. It would also have to be very small and low-power, which in some ways will be even more challenging than developing the connections. IBM presented its latest results at the Supercomputing 2012 conference.

[IBM via KurzweilAI]

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Researchers harness static electricity from your twitchiness to charge batteries

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/researchers-harness-static-electricity-from-movement/

If you're the fidgety type, new research from Georga Tech may one day turn your nervous energy into a fully charged cellphone. The scientists, who previously borrowed piezoelectric power from walking, created static electricity generated from movement between plastic and metal, similar to the way a balloon can be electrified by rubbing it on your hair. The charging area was greatly increased by patterning the surfaces on a nanoscale level, allowing this "tribolectric effect" to be multiplied and converting up to 15 percent of the mechanical energy into electricity (so far). About 50 common materials could be paired to create the material, and a 2 x 2-inch patch could conceivably be worn as an armband and used to charge up a cellphone battery. So far the tech works fine in the lab, but it remains to be seen if real world vibrations can generate enough energy to make it practical. While you're waiting, though, feel free to stock up on coffee.

Filed under: Cellphones, Science, Mobile

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Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: Nano Letters

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