Google is hooking Qualcomm, 4-core audio chip and other news.
Qualcomm X50 coming soon to all 5G smartphones
Qualcomm called its promising new 5G modem for mobile devices X50, thereby maintaining the continuity in the name (X14 and X12 in Snapdragon 835 and 821) and hinting at a high degree of product availability. This became known after successful laboratory tests, during which the X50 showed gigabit connection speeds. At the end of 2017 and the first half of 2018, it is planned to test the Qualcomm modem 'in the field' together with telecommunications companies, who took care in advance and created test networks. These companies include Australian Telstra, Japanese NTT DoCoMo, European Vodafone and American Verizon. In addition to Qualcomm, Cisco, Samsung, Ericsson, Intel, LG and Nokia provide technical support in deploying test 5G networks for these pioneers. Unfortunately, there are no Russian networks in this list.
Qualcomm X50 at its finest
It can be assumed that the Russian telecom is simply not allowed into the holy of holies – participation in the development of standards and the testing of technologies, but more and more often the thought arises that our business is going the beaten path and resells someone else's product to us under its own label. However, let's not rush and see how the Chinese block, created under the auspices of China Mobile, will respond. The first commercial launches 5G of the networks are still scheduled for 2019.
Google Trojan Horse
Google has revealed its first chip for consumer devices. Is this a new sign of the search engine's hardware ambition and a threat to its current semiconductor suppliers? Chip development is time consuming and costly, and few smartphone manufacturers other than Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. do it themselves. Google has already developed processors for its datacenters, but this is the first time the company has tried its hand at developing for consumer equipment. The new chip is called Pixel Visual Core, already installed in Google Pixel 2 and integrated with the smartphone's photo module. Google promises five times faster HDR processing with 10x power savings compared to what the Qualcomm Spectra ISP and the Hexagon ™ 680 DSP are currently doing in the Snapdragon 835. Google. The surprise does not end directly with the activation of the 'Trojan horse' in the person of the Pixel Visual Core, Google decided to give access to its hardware resources to all third-party applications.
HDR + read by Qualcomm and Google, coming soon to all Pixel 2 and XL
There is no doubt that Qualcomm Inc. this news is unpleasant, because they spent so much effort and money on developing their own solutions. And now a player with such a big name as Google, publicly refuses their developments, trampling down the common glorious past and trust. No, Google will not stop using Qualcomm in the future, but the 'sediment' will remain for a very long time.
I would like to congratulate all Pixel 2 owners, the new features in your smartphone are a reward for your trust in Google.
The reverse side of flash memory on the example of Sidense
In the consumer sector, focused on the production and distribution of various electronic storage devices, there is always an emphasis on read / write speed and the number of rewrites to failure. And news about the reverse side of the use of flash memory, when it is necessary to write information only once, open access to reading and prevent overwriting, passes completely unnoticed. The most widespread use of such information carriers is not at all in the field of security, as one might think. Of course, there are various electronic keys and password keepers, but most often such memory can be found in the production of a car, as part of the motherboard of a welding robot or a logistics terminal. Why there? Because modern high-tech manufacturing has long been in conditions similar to the hypothetical Internet of Things. From the warehouse conveyor to the factory gate, almost every single unit is in a single control network, and the issue of the stability of each individual unit is of increasing importance. The 'one-time' memory must quickly display the recorded information and be resistant not only to changes in the record, but also to withstand electrical overload, non-standard operating conditions, etc.
It is extremely difficult to estimate the size of this market; it is everywhere. All that remains is to glance at the announcement of Synopsys' purchase of Sidense, a developer in the field of one-time programmable memory (OTP NVM), along with all of its specialists.
Knowles Corp's new mobile audio processor
Knowles Corp. unveiled a new audio processor designed to improve performance and amplify sound in a variety of systems, including mobile phones, tablets, televisions and IoT objects. The IA8505 audio processor is an open platform that includes a four-core heterogeneous digital signal processor (ARM Cortex M4) and 5.7 MB of shared memory. The patented instruction set gives access to deep machine learning of the future device, and the support for floating point calculations will appeal to programmers. Based on Knowles Corp., machine learning is 10 times more efficient than comparable processors (which are not specified). The 'heterogeneity' of the processor cores implies the independent or joint operation of the audio chip in solving problems: 'close voice', 'far voice', 'filtering and noise suppression', 'asynchronous sampling rate conversion', 'power consumption', 'switching with other ARM tiers , for use in general computing '.
As is clear from the text, Knowles Corp. made an external universal module based on ARM, which can organically fit into any device based on this architecture or work separately, being preprogrammed. I want to ask you, friends, will the number of cores in its audio chip affect your choice when buying a smart coffee maker?
Loongson v Intel and MCST Elbrus
In China, the battle for information security at the general-purpose processor level is gaining momentum. As we all know, although we don't often talk about it, high-tech processors have a kind of 'dual purpose', serving not only the buyer, but also the state security structures of the manufacturer's country. It is in this vein that news from China should be viewed, where the Beijing company Loongson is at the forefront of the struggle for this independence. It was this company that created the country's first processor, the intellectual rights to which are wholly owned by China. “We will fight for the telecommunications, finance, energy and government procurement market,” said Hu Weiwu, president of Loongson Technology Corp. In April, the company unveiled its latest Loongson 3A3000 and 3B3000 processors, which offer more processing power than their predecessors.
How powerful are these solutions? The computing power of the Russian 8-core processor MCST Elbrus-16S (international name Elbrus-8CV, release is planned for 2018) is 576 Gflops, 8-core Longson 3B3000 (2017) – 192 Gflops, 8-core Intel Core i7-5960X (Extreme Edition Haswell-E, 2014) – 350 Gflops. The priorities for the development of China's electronics industry for the domestic market are obvious and correct – to take a dominant position in the manufacturing and government sectors and build their AI structures only on their own computing power.