Expect 64-bit Android devices by Christmas?

An ARM executive has told CNET that the plan to shift to 64-bit is happening faster than they expected. Tom Lantzsch, executive vice president of corporate strategy at ARM, said there has been an increase in the demand for 64-bit mobile processors, like that in the Cortex A53 64-bit mobile processor. And that it won’t be long until we see Android devices powered by these processors. "We believe the capability will be there for a 64-bit phone by Christmas," he said.

What can a 64-bit processor bring to the Android market? Lantzsch said it would even make 32-bit code run more efficiently on ARM’s 64 bit v8-A architecture than on the native 32-bit ARM architecture. This would mean battery life would improve, better features will be introduced, and there would be quicker responsiveness.

Qualcomm introduces 64-bit Snapdragon chipsets

Qualcomm is bringing to the market two new mobile processors built with 64-bit architecture and Cat 6 LTE. The Snapdragon 810 and 808 are intended to improve on its current offerings to help usher in better devices in the future. The chips are expected to hit the market next year.

The new members of the Snapdragon line will add support for 4K displays with the help of the Adreno 430 GPU and these processors based on ARM core designs instead of its own Krait. Qualcomm said Cat 6 LTE support will depend on the carriers. The Snapdragon 810 uses a combination of a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 processor and Cortex-A53. While the 808 uses two ARM Cortex-A57 with a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU.

Source: Android Police

NVIDIA brings PC gaming capabilities to mobile

The next-generation of NVIDIA mobile processors are going to be gamers’ dream come true. The new Tegra K1 has a Kepler architecture-based 192-core GPU, which is the same architecture used by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti (considered the fastest GPU in the world). The company boldly claims the GPU on the Tegra K1 is more powerful than the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

The demo of NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang showed the Tegra K1 running Unreal 4 without glitch. The new game is said to require extreme CPU power that is enough to hang an underpowered system. There will be two versions of the processor: one 32-bit quad-core, 4-Plus-1 ARM Cortex A15 CPU available in the first half of 2014 and 64-bit dual Super Core CPU based on ARMv8 architecture and carries the codename Denver. The 64-bit version will be available at the second half of the year.

Source: NVIDIA