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      Chrome launches native build for Arm-powered Windows laptops

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 2 days ago - 17:18 · 1 minute

    Extreme close-up photograph of finger above Chrome icon on smartphone.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

    We are quickly barreling toward an age of viable Arm-powered Windows laptops with the upcoming launch of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU. Hardware options are great, but getting useful computers out of them will require a lot of new software, and a big one has just launched: Chrome for Windows on Arm.

    Google has had a nightly "canary" build running since January , but now it has a blog post up touting a production-ready version of Chrome for "Arm-compatible Windows PCs powered by Snapdragon." That's right, Qualcomm has a big hand in this release, too, with its own press announcement touting Google's browser release for its upcoming chip. Google promises a native version of Chrome will be "fully optimized for your PC’s [Arm] hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother."

    Apple upended laptop CPU architecture when it dumped Intel and launched the Arm-based Apple Silicon M1. A few years later and Qualcomm is ready to answer—mostly by buying a company full of Apple Silicon veterans—with the upcoming launch of the Snapdragon X Elite chip. Qualcomm claims the X Elite will bring Apple Silicon-class hardware to Windows, but the chip isn't out yet—it's due for a "mid-2024" release. Most of the software you'll be running will still be written in x86 and need to go through a translation layer, which will slow things down, but at least it won't have to be your primary browser.

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      Intel will make chips for Microsoft

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 22 February - 14:35

    Intel CEO speaking

    Enlarge / Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaks during the "AI Everywhere" event on December 14, 2023, in New York, NY. (credit: Intel Corporation )

    US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world.

    Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to “rebuild Western manufacturing at scale,” buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US.

    Since Gelsinger took the helm three years ago, Intel has been attempting to reinvent itself as a foundry business, building chips designed by other companies, regaining an edge in making the most advanced semiconductors. Demand for them is soaring, driven by the rise of generative AI.

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      Shares in chip designer Arm soar by more than 50% leaving it valued at $120bn

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 8 February - 15:48

    CEO Rene Haas says UK-based firm is benefiting from huge demand for products and apps powered by AI

    Shares in Arm have soared by more than 50% after raising profit and revenue forecasts amid red-hot demand for artificial intelligence technology, valuing the UK-based tech company at double the market capitalisation when it floated in September.

    Shares in the world’s biggest supplier of design elements for processing chips used in products from smartphones to games consoles opened up 58% on the Nasdaq in the US on Thursday.

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      Raspberry Pi is preparing for an IPO in London for likely more than $500M

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 30 January - 17:40

    Raspberry Pi 5 with Active Cooler installed on a wood desktop

    Enlarge / Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing? So small a thing! (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London, bringing new capital into the company and likely changing the nature of the privately held, charity-controlled company.

    CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for "when the IPO market reopens."

    Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn't quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022 . After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million.

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      BBC BASIC remains a remarkable learning tool, and now it’s available everywhere

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 29 November - 18:42 · 1 minute

    BBC Micro system, at medium distance, with full keyboard and case showing.

    Enlarge / A vintage 1981 BBC Micro computer. Fun fact: it was rather tricky to determine which version of BBC Basic a Micro was actually running. (credit: Getty Images)

    BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It taught an entire generation of Brits how to code, both in BASIC and, through an inline interpreter, assembly language. And it's still around to teach newcomers and anybody else—except it's now on far, far more platforms than a mail-order computer from the telly.

    BBCSDL , or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 , uses Simple DirectMedia Layer's OS abstraction to make itself available on Windows, x86 Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi's OS, Android, iOS, and inside browsers through WebAssembly. Version 1.38a arrived in mid-November with quite a few fixes and niceties (as first noticed by Hackaday and its readers). On the project's website, you can see BBCSDL running on all these devices, along with a note that on iOS and in browsers, an assembler and a few other functions are not available, due to arbitrary code-execution restrictions.

    BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, running on iOS devices, in graphical mode.

    BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, running on iOS devices, in graphical mode. (credit: Richard Russell / R.T. Russell )

    Richard Russell has been working on ports, interpreters, and other variations of BBC BASIC since 1983 , starting with interpreters for Z80 and Intel processors. By 2001, BBC BASIC for Windows was available with a graphical interface and was still compatible with the BBC Micro and Acorn computers from whence it came. BBCSDL has been in development since 2015, providing wider platform offerings while still retaining decent compatibility with BBC BASIC for Windows.

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      Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 27 October - 21:58

    Intel's Meteor Lake laptop CPUs launch this December, and they'll be facing competition from more high-end Arm processors.

    Enlarge / Intel's Meteor Lake laptop CPUs launch this December, and they'll be facing competition from more high-end Arm processors. (credit: Intel)

    Chip companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD are all either planning or said to be planning another attempt at making Arm chips for the consumer PC market. Qualcomm is leading the charge in mid-2024 with its Snapdragon X Elite and a new CPU architecture called Oryon. And Reuters reported earlier this week that Nvidia and AMD are targeting a 2025 release window for their own Arm chips for Windows PCs.

    If these companies successfully get their chips into PCs, it would mostly come at Intel's expense. But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn't seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company's most recent earnings call ( via Seeking Alpha ).

    "Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally, they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," said Gelsinger. "And we take all competition seriously. But I think history as our guide here, we don't see these potentially being all that significant overall. Our momentum is strong. We have a strong roadmap."

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      Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 17 October - 17:34 · 1 minute

    Qualcomm sign

    Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

    The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a "tier 1 platform" on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC .

    It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a "RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to "commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out "will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance."

    RISC-V represents a big threat to the Arm CPU architecture that currently dominates all mobile devices. RISC-V architecture is open source, which can make it cheaper and more flexible than Arm. If companies want to design their own chips, they can do that without paying a licensing fee to Arm. Since the architecture is open source, it's possible to create a fully open source chip. If you're a chip-design firm, you can make your own proprietary chip designs and license them, making you a competitor to Arm's chip-design business.

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      Snapdragon X : la puce de Qualcomm qui veut rivaliser avec Apple

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Friday, 13 October - 16:44

    snapdragon-x-qualcomm-158x105.jpg Snapdragon X Qualcomm

    La concurrence s'organise face aux fameuses puces Silicon d'Apple. Qualcomm vient d'officialiser sa nouvelle plateforme Snapdragon X.

    Snapdragon X : la puce de Qualcomm qui veut rivaliser avec Apple