Is four the new two? Mobile quad core arrives right on time. Two, we hardly knew ya.

APPLE INSIDER STORY >>

Putting some hot new dual-core chipset in that new smartphone you’re designing? Sorry to tell you this, but it looks like dual is like so five minutes ago.

It seems like it wasn’t more than a year ago when dual-core processors in handsets were the absolute cutting edge. A speed war was brewing among smartphone vendors. There was chest pounding of specs: “1 GHz dual-core.” But there wasn’t much talk of actual benefits. But just as the megapixel arms race morphed into a speed race, the core battle is now upon us.

The other day, NVIDIA officially announced its Tegra 3, a quad-core mobile processor with five cores! The Tegra 3 is based on ARM’s Cortex A9 CPU with each single core running up to 1.4 GHz, supports full HD 1080p video playback and 7.1 surround sound audio, and it runs a 12-core GeForce GPU for what NVIDIA says will lead to three times the video performance. When you start talking a dozen cores, you’re bound to get some early adopter interest.

Pay for four cores, get the fifth for free!
An interesting development with the Tegra 3 is the introduction of what NVIDIA calls the “Companion Core,” a fifth lower-power and slower (500 MHz) core to provide CPU support to for less-intensive tasks such as stand-by. This is a clever way to drive battery efficiency. In face, NVIDIA is claiming the Tegra 3 supports up to 12 hours ov video playback on the device, a 60% increase in battery performance over the Tegra 2.

We’ll soon be seeing some intense video, audio, and gaming experiences on tablets and smartphones thanks to chips like this.

So, is it a dual to the finish? And soon a finish to the dual?

HP ARMs servers. How worried should Intel, AMD be?

via PCWORLD >>

PRESS RELEASE >>

ARM processors in HP servers? Pretty cool. Literally.

It’s interesting to see that ARM-based chips aren’t just being tested in laptops and tablets but also in servers. In general, they’re more energy efficient and run cooler than processors from vendors Intel and AMD, so there could be consider savings in energy and space.

So, here’s news of HP testing ARM-based processors in servers. These test machines will be based on what HP calls the “Redstone” platform, rack-mounted hardware with 72 small server boards, each with four 1.4GHz ARM Cortex-A9 design-based processors made by Calxeda. The server will be running a 32-bit version of Linux.

Glenn Keels, director of marketing for HP’s Hyperscale Business Unit: “We want to get the technology out there so that people can start testing their applications for suitability.”

A farewell to ARM? Not likely. The PC-Mobile clash has gotten white hot. All chips are in.

For more than a decade, Intel has been trying to get into the mobile market. But now it looks like the mobile market is about to get into Intel. And for Microsoft, there appears to be an inverse correlation to spend and success in mobile.

The clash between the mobile and PC milieus reached a peak this week with public displays of affection between Google and Intel. And between Microsoft and ARM. To me, these deals highlight the long-term failures of both Intel and Microsoft to break into the handset market in any significant way. Sure, an Intel chip made its way into the first Nokia Communicator back in 1996. But not a heck of a lot has happened since. And Microsoft's share of the smartphone market has reached a record low --under 3%-- last quarter. This despite having two mobile platforms on the market and some heavy ad spending.


The announcement from Google & Intel that Intel-powered Android smartphones will be coming out next year is certainly an interesting development for the market. And this means an additional boost for Android at a time when the platform has already taken 50% of the market. Intel's jumping on a bandwagon, and we should see more converged devices running Android including tablet- and laptop-like form factors.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the counter press release from Microsoft & ARM with additional cheerleading by processor vendors such as NVIDIA have ARM-based Windows PCs coming out in the near future. Porting Windows to run on ARM could be the shot across iPad's bow. Microsoft's use of the tile-based Metro UI in Windows 8 indicates that mobility and touch are leading the way. Windows 8 looks a lot like Windows Phone 7. Metro is the new WIMP. Introducing such an entirely new interface in Windows is a risky bet by Microsoft, but the software vendor knows it needs to do something to pull itself forward.

In reality the above announcements are not new. But at this point they stress the changes in the market: the partnerships, the form factors, the paranoia.

The collision course between PCs and mobile devices is all set. Let's see if something tasty comes out of all this:

Hey! You got mobile in my PC...
Two great tastes that taste great together?