arm

Apple has reportedly made a rare acquisition, snapping up low-power chip company PA Semi one day before reporting its quarterly earnings.

Forbes reported late Tuesday that Apple has agreed to purchase the company for a middling $278 million, quoting Apple spokesman Steve Dowling as confirming the deal. PA Semi made its debut a few years back designing low-power chips based on Apple's old friend, the Power architecture.

It's not clear what Apple might have in mind for PA Semi. I'd doubt Apple plans to get into the chip design game anytime soon, although having low-power chip experts … Read more

The iPhone is a mobile Internet device. Just in case you forgot, ARM wants to remind you that before the Intel Atom processor there was the iPhone and its handful of ARM processors. Yeah, it's a MID too.

Listening to Intel, a casual observer might believe that the world's largest chipmaker is single-handedly creating the class of tiny devices called mobile Internet devices or MIDs.

But ARM processors have been powering small, low-power devices since 1985. There was the Psion series of handhelds, the Apple Newton, Nintendo DS, and, today, products like the Microsoft Zune. All used or … Read more

Intellectual property (IP) companies are unique business entities. Theirs is a complex, controversial world characterized by huge capital investments, epic legal battles, rollercoaster stock rides, fanatical investors, and of course, lots of patents.

Why should you care? Because, their technology helps almost all your gadgets work the way they do. And for that privilege, their executives, employees and investors go through hell.… Read more

The new moniker "Atom" sets in marketing stone the Intel brand for small devices. I'll skip the banalities about Atom silicon being crucial for Intel's future and just pose a question: Can Intel spur innovation in ultrasmall devices the way it has in the PC and server industry?

I won't hazard any rash predictions but will make a few observations about the current landscape.

First, a little recent history. The ultramobile PC (UMPC) based on Intel's first-generation processor (the A110) for small devices has not exactly been the market sensation that the iPhone has. … Read more

What do you want in a mobile computer?

How much performance do you want to give up for longer battery life? Would you buy a clunky mobile computer that can run anything you throw at it? If you're the envy of the digerati when you walk down the street with your new phone, but you can't use it to make reservations at Nobu, are you still cool?

Chipmakers are struggling with these questions as well as how to adjust their recipes for the future of mobile computing. It's not so much the about chips themselves, but how … Read more

Teens may have a better understanding of privacy issues than the adults around them. Unfortunately, when you are a high school student, your personal judgment can still be challenged by an unsympathetic principal.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports that at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough North Carolina, more than 300 juniors were given the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The military provides and administers the tests without charge, and in return the scores and students' contact information are sent to military branch recruiters and the school.

Cedar Ridge Principal Gary Thornburg was willing to sign on to this deal to get access to what he views as a valuable career assessment tool. There is supposed to be an opt-out procedure, but three students who refused to take the test were sent to the in-school suspension room to take it--not as discipline, according to Thornburg, but because the in-school suspension teacher was available to supervise them while other students were taking the test. Sounds like a blatantly disingenuous answer to me. In my experience as a student and teacher, when you send students to in-school suspension, it is going to feel like a punishment and be perceived that way by others. Surely their well-equipped media center could have handled three students for independent study.… Read more

Texas Instruments has a new OMAP chip to set upon the world, and this time around it's eyeing more than mobile phones.

The new OMAP3440 made its debut in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2008. This is the latest in TI's line of OMAP applications processors, which are the equivalent of the CPUs inside PCs.

TI sells standalone applications processors like the 3440 to customers such as Nokia for use in high-end smartphones, but it is also talking up the potential for the 3440 as a chip for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). That's Intel's name for … Read more

Samsung Electronics introduced a new ARM-based processor for smartphones at Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. The S3C6410 "mobile application processor" includes special hardware accelerators to handle motion video processing and 3D graphics, thereby freeing up the main processor for other tasks and speeding overall performance.

At the heart of the S3C6410 is an ARM1176 processor core that can be clocked up to 667MHz. The chip is made on Samsung's advanced 65-nanometer manufacturing process.

By embedding a hardwired Multi Format Codec on-chip, the S3C6410 can perform video capture in MPEG4/H.263/H.264 formats and … Read more

For Army researchers looking to give robot operators new ways to "see" via unmanned ground vehicles on the battlefield one thing is clear, legacy video doesn't cut it anymore.

It's not just broadcast quality or resolution that needs improvement, but the level of "telepresence": the sense of increased situational awareness that allows a robot driver to shoot and move and make fast decisions.

One possible upgrade is the three-axis Head-Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV), a dome enclosed, three-axel gimbal-mounted camera that slews around to match operator head movement. Wherever the soldier/operator looks, the unit … Read more