Who can't sleep in Singapore on a dead night? Coolest hard drive ever? Samsung's new chipset boggles the mind? Does anyone else make barrel organ in the 21st century? The answers to these questions are under the cut.
Hawk Tan (Broadcom) wants to buy MediaTek?
Hawk Tan (Broadcom) – MediaTek huh?
The Singaporean tiger Hawk Tan continues to attack related companies, this time in its home region. The Singaporean Chinese edition of the Economic Daily News (EDN) reported on a secret meeting between Hawk Tan and Chairman MediaTek M.K. Tsai and suggested that Broadcom offered to buy out a controlling stake MediaTek. The comment from MediaTek was not long in coming and was striking in its complete lack of specifics, although the media took it as a refusal:
There has been no discussion or contact between Broadcom and MediaTek regarding the subject matter of such media statements.
M.K. Tsai (MediaTek) – Broadcom, no …
Meanwhile, according to The Motley Fool (a multimedia finance company that provides financial advice to investors through a variety of stock, investment and personal financial services. Home port – Virginia, USA), Hawk Tan may also want to buy Cirrus Logic and Xilinx. Almost all of Cirrus's business serves the interests Apple, and Xilinx is a direct competitor Intel in the production of system logic, simple and programmable (FPGA and FPGA).
Do you think Broadcom will be able to buy anything? Or will she keep getting rejected?
Nimbus Data panders to perfectionists
Over the past years, we have heard from various smartphone manufacturers the thesis about transferring all data to the cloud. Such statements should have led to the fact that the capacity of the built-in memory of smartphones would remain at the level of previous years. But, as life shows, the increase in the size of information storage is taking place simultaneously in smartphones and cloud servers. To solve the latter problem, new storage media are needed with both huge volumes and high read / write speeds.
Previously, this was realized with huge cabinets, which contained endless rows of HDD disks. A little later, SSDs penetrated the servers, which made their use economically feasible when purchasing large quantities. Against this background, the new SSD-drive in a standard 3.5-inch design with standard SATA or SAS (your choice) interfaces and amazing characteristics looks especially interesting. It is the world's first 100 TB SSD.
The model from Nimbus Data is called the ExaDrive DC100 and is built around 3D NAND and can be installed anywhere. Even in your home computer. 100 TB is at least 8 times more than any modern hard drive. It is also the most energy efficient SSD in the world, with just 0.1W of 1 TB, which is about 80 to 90 percent less than any competitor. The life cycle of the record holder is perfectly indicated by the official warranty, which is 5 years, subject to unlimited DWPD (Drive Writes per Day). The closest competitors have a DWPD in guarantee limited to 2-5 cell records per day. The write speed is also complete, it is 500 Mbit / s. According to Nimbus Data, the drive will increase the speed of the entire device by at least 50%. At the moment, the price of the device has not been announced, but, according to the manufacturer, it will correspond to the market average based on a dollar per TB, the same as for MLC drives.
100,000 gigabytes is a minimum of 50,000 movies in 720p quality, and when you try to count the number of music or photos in your head, you can be shocked. ExaDrive DC100 will appear in stores this summer. Do you think this SSD is needed in a home computer or home NAS? And if it's free?
Samsung Exynos 7 series 9610
Suddenly Samsung presented to the public a new mobile processor of the 7-series 9610. When this news appeared, many semi-professional media rushed to hang the label “new processor for top smartphones” on the novelty. Of course it is not. This chipset is a mid-range solution, both in terms of performance and cost. Samsung themselves explain its appearance by the need to provide users with an inexpensive device stuffed with new fashionable technologies. The chipset is initially positioned as having passed deep machine learning (in fact, we are talking about modifying drivers, task manager, and other software) for image processing. If we speak in the language of analogies, then this is another evolutionary round, the same as moving the HDR function from a separate application to the hardware level. Now we can talk about a similar transfer and optimization in relation to the 'slow-mo' function.
PR around AI, neural networks and their training has been raging for several years, but in the end we always deal with the work done on debugging existing functions. This is good, there is no dispute, but it does not mean at all that smartphones have become much smarter. And if you do not want to listen to information in the form of endless slogans, but want to really understand, then you just need to look at the characteristics of the Exynos 7 series 9610 chipset:
- CPU: 4 cores Cortex A-53 (up to 1.6 GHz) + 4 cores Cortex A73 (up to 2.3 GHz)
- GPU: ARM Mali ™ -G72 MP3
- Screen support: up to WQSGA (2560×1600)
- LTE Modem: Download 600 MB / sec, Send 150 MB / sec
- ROM controller: UFS 2.1 and eMMC 5.1
- RAM: LPDDR4X
- Chip Process: 10 nm FinFET (2nd generation)
Separately, it is worth writing about that part of photography, for which the chipset is responsible. Optimization and training of the chipset led to the emergence of new opportunities, the most important of which is the recognition of faces in almost any conditions, even when the face is not turned to the camera or most of it is covered by foreign objects. Another feature of the chipset is the hardware support for the effect, which is similar to the work of DSRL cameras. The chipset takes one picture from several frames coming from the camera module in automatic mode. Or it offers the user to play with the focus on an already taken photo. The level of image processing has reached the point where the chipset no longer needs two camera modules to make real bokeh.
When we talk about Samsung, we can be sure that the optimization of processes has really been made and everything will work smartly with minimal energy consumption. At peak load, the chipset should deliver performance comparable to Qualcomm Snapdragon 821+. The only doubt is the graphics in the form of ARM Mali ™ -G72 MP3. Its predecessor in the form of Mali ™ -G72 MP2 showed results that were only slightly superior to those of the Adreno 505. We hope that the optimization has affected it, because it is not without reason that it is indicated as 'playable' on the promo page.
That, in principle, is all that is known at the moment about the new chipset for the middle price segment from Samsung.
Robot Werther looked into the water when he talked about the competition of robot guitarists
It would seem that in the 21st century there should be no music boxes and other heritage from the 18th century. But every time humanity makes a technological breakthrough, there are originals seeking to squeeze old ideas into modern devices. Make a steam-powered plane or a balloon-based drone. Or maybe these people just treat technology as an object of art? If this is the case, then they can be understood and forgiven.
Robot guitar player shoved into a cute homemade box
This material is for entertainment purposes only and temporarily replaces the heading 'British scientists invented' due to the lull in their activity in the last week. The MIDI box shown in the photo was made by hand, and it differs from the original device of the 18th century by the absence of a manual drive for the organ-grinder's hand.
Board with Cortex M3 chip translates MIDI files into mechanical movement of electric motors
The electronic control board splits the MIDI signal and routes the power to the desired electric motor. The motor imparts mechanical movement to the brass spoke, which hits the stop on the rotating drum and produces sound. If you watch the video to the end, you will understand that this is a very simplified description, and the mechanism itself is so mysterious that it defies the logic of the digital age.
This is the art. We do not translate sound into soulless digital, but on the contrary, we make the digital play live music. You can learn more about the device on this resource. The device is unlikely to ever hit the market. But try to answer yourself, could you refuse to listen to it, come home on Friday night and lounged on the couch with the thought of relaxing?