Remember our quick blurb about how Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich was going to turn mobile devices into portable gaming machines thanks to its gamepad and HDMI support? At the time, we thought playing Game Dev Story on a big screen would be cool. Our excitement factor just increased ten-fold on the heels of ARM’s announcement of the eight-core Mali-T658 mobile GPU, which ARM claims can pump out Playstation 3-quality graphics on mobile devices and smart TVs. There’s a catch, though.
With all the success ARM is enjoying in the mobile market, including tablets PCs, smartphones, and just about every handheld device you can think of, it's somewhat surprising the company hasn't had a 64-bit instruction set up to this point. That's about to change. ARM just disclosed some technical specs of its new ARMv8 architecture, the first to include a 64-bit instruction set.
Nvidia’s founder and president Jen-Hsun Huang was on hand at this years AsiaD conference, and as usual, he put on quite the show. In addition to reconfirming the companies future plans for the Tegra platform, he offered up sage advice for Microsoft on 
Intel may have the PC processor market in a virtual stranglehold, but on the mobile front, ARM’s low-powered chips have made the company a contender. The diminutive new Cortex A7 processor announced today is one-fifth the size and uses one-fifth the power of the Cortex A8, but ARM has big things planned for it. Not only does the company have eyes on the sub-$100 phone market, but new technology that ARM calls “big.LITTLE processing” could have the A7 serving as a plucky little Robin to the beefier Cortex A15’s Batman.
Apple recently launched the iPhone 4S. The device features a dual-core A5 chip which,although designed in-house, is manufactured by Samsung. The A5 is but the latest chapter in a longstanding partnership worth billions. Given the increasing rivalry between the two companies, this partnership is beginning to look less and less sustainable by the day, with a raft of recent reports even claiming that the A5 inside the 4S marks the the end of the buyer-supplier relationship. The Korea Times, though, does not think so.
Microsoft is unlike other pretenders to the tablet throne, all of whom are simply following Apple’s lead, in that it wants Windows 8-based tablets to deliver both the versatility and power of traditional PCs and the pickup-and-play ease of media tablets. But that’s where the differences end as Redmond also seems to have a fair amount of faith in the old adage “when in Rome . . .” Like Apple, the pioneer of the modern app store, MS also plans to keep 30 percent of all app sales. But that’s not the only part of Apple’s app distribution model to have caught Microsoft's fancy.
Microsoft’s been tripping over itself to show ARM some love and develop a tablet version of Windows 8 that can run on the developer’s low-powered processors. But don’t think the giant in Redmond is smitten just because of all the batted eyelashes and blown kisses; Intel was busy showing off Windows 8 on a tablet at the IDF yesterday, and to top that off, Microsoft’s VP of cloud and servers said that the company isn’t developing an ARM-powered version of its upcoming Windows Server 8.
Canonical hasn't been bashful about backing ARM, injecting support for the alternative processor into its desktop Ubuntu platform nearly three years ago before tablets and 1GHz smartphones made ARM the talk of the town. Now comes word that Ubuntu Server 11.10 will support ARM processors and ship simultaneously with x86 and x86-64 platforms.
What could a mouse possibly want with a 32-bit ARM processor? We're sure Jerry could concoct a few high tech contraptions designed to thwart Tom, but SteelSeries has something else in mind. The company's new Sensei is being billed as "the most customizable mouse to ever hit the competitive gaming industry," and it's mostly thanks to the ARM chip that allows for hardware-based sensitivity settings and real-time calculations that eliminate interpolation and extrapolation delays.
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