Smartphones

This week Samsung Electronics and Synopsys announced that Samsung has taped out its first mobile system-on-chip on Samsung Foundry's 3nm gate-all-around (GAA) process technology. The announcement, coming from electronic design automation Synopsys, further notes that Samsung used the Synopsys.ai EDA suite to place-n-route the layout and verify design of the SoC, which in turn enabled higher performance. Samsung's unnamed high-performance mobile SoC relies on 'flagship' general-purpose CPU and GPU architectures as well as various IP blocks from Synopsys. SoC designers used Synopsys.ai EDA software, including the Synopsys DSO.ai to fine-tune design and maximize yields as well as Synopsys Fusion Compiler RTL-to-GDSII solution to achieve higher performance, lower power, and optimize area (PPA). And while the news that Samsung has developed a high-performance SoC using the Synopsys.ai...

LG Optimus G Announced, One of the First Smartphones to Use Qualcomm's Quad Core Snapdragon

Today LG has announced the Optimus G (LG-F180), the company's first smartphone to use Qualcomm's APQ8064, otherwise known as the Snapdragon S4 Pro. Under the hood there are four...

8 by Stefan Constantinescu on 8/28/2012

The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 2

We're back! After a false start last week, we have our second podcast. This week Brian Klug, Ryan Smith and myself discussed Thunderbolt, Quick Sync in OS X, Windows...

25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/28/2012

Preparing for the iPhone Next: Rumors Analyzed

While we typically don't comment on rumors we don't know to be true at AnandTech, we often get requests to help set rational expectations ahead of major iDevice launches...

132 by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/27/2012

Plantronics BackBeat Go Review - Almost the Perfect Bluetooth Earbuds

A few months ago at the Samsung Galaxy S 3 announcement event, I noticed another mobile editor wearing a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that were unlike any other I...

31 by Brian Klug on 8/27/2012

Sprint 4G LTE Network Performance on the Motorola Photon Q

Last week Motorola sent us the Photon Q 4G LTE, a Qualcomm MSM8960 based Android smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. While I'll touch on the phone and its...

15 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/26/2012

Qualcomm Announces upcoming LG Smartphone with APQ8064 and MDM9615 Inside

We've been talking about how the next upcoming smartphone platform from Qualcomm will be the combination of a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core APQ8064 alongside an MDM9x15 baseband for...

4 by Brian Klug on 8/22/2012

Intel's Medfield Reference Design Picked up by Russia's MegaFon

Intel has taken a unique approach to getting its Medfield SoC into the hands of customers around the world. After building a competitive, midrange (by today's standards) reference smartphone...

13 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/22/2012

Synaptics Talks In-Cell Touch & The Value of a Good Touch Controller

After Rick Bergman left AMD, a few familiar faces joined him at his new home Synaptics. Godfrey Cheng joined not too long after Bergman's departure as Synaptics' VP of...

10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/17/2012

Xiaomi Announces MIUI Phone Mi-Two with Quad Core Krait APQ8064 inside

About a year ago, I had the chance to play with a Xiaomi MIUI Mi-One handset while working on our Vellamo introduction and benchmarking story. The phone was based...

34 by Brian Klug on 8/16/2012

The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 1

Last Friday, Brian Klug, Ian Cutress and myself took an hour to discuss a lot of what was on our minds lately. At a high level we discussed building...

59 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/13/2012

RightWare Launches Basemark GUI Free on Android Market - We Test It Out

Earlier this year RightWare launched a free version of the popular Basemark ES 2.0 benchmark free on the Android market in the form of Basemark ES 2.0 Taiji Free...

16 by Brian Klug on 8/13/2012

Samsung Announces A15/Mali-T604 Based Exynos 5 Dual

Yesterday Samsung officially announced what we all knew was coming: the Exynos 5 Dual. Due to start shipping sometime between the end of the year and early next year...

36 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/10/2012

NVIDIA Q2 FY13 Earnings Report: $1.04B Revenue, Tegra Sales Recover

I don't normally comment on earning's calls, but this is something I've been talking a lot about in meetings offline so I decided to write up a short post...

14 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/10/2012

T-Mobile RF Engineer Does Reddit AMA - Answers a Few LTE Questions

In the past, carriers have been guarded if not purposely opaque about things like radio network planning, infrastructure rollouts, and other competitive details. With the smartphone boom well underway...

14 by Brian Klug on 8/8/2012

Apple Releases iOS 6 Beta 4, Removes YouTube.app

Earlier today, Apple released iOS 6 Beta 4 to iOS developers, moving the new iOS release one step closer to launch. The update is available for previous iOS 6...

19 by Brian Klug on 8/6/2012

ARM Announces 8-core 2nd Gen Mali-T600 GPUs

In our discrete GPU reviews for the desktop we've often noticed the tradeoff between graphics and compute performance in GPU architectures. Generally speaking, when a GPU is designed for...

25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/6/2012

Anand Chandrasekher Joins Qualcomm

Qualcomm has been on a hiring roll lately. Not only did it scoop up AMD's Eric Demers, but today Qualcomm announced that Anand Chandrasekher would be joining as CMO...

10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 8/6/2012

AT&T's HTC One X Gets Updated, Changes Task Switcher Button, Coming to all One S and X Devices

Probably one of the most interesting and controversial decisions about the HTC One series involves something as basic as button placement. Rather than use on-screen buttons like the Galaxy...

16 by Brian Klug on 8/4/2012

GLBenchmark 2.5 Performance on iOS and Android Devices

Earlier today we published our first results using GLBenchmark 2.5, the long awaited update to one of our most frequently used mobile GPU benchmarks. In our first article we...

58 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 7/31/2012

GLBenchmark 2.5 Performance on Modern Android Smartphones & Tablets

For quite a while now, GLBenchmark has been a regular test in our smartphone, tablet, and SoC reviews. As GPU performance has steadily increased, GLbenchmark 2.1.x started hitting vsync...

47 by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on 7/31/2012

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