Aug

5

Intel takes on AMD and Nvidia with new graphic chips Larrabee

Filed Under GPU and Gaming, Microprocessor | 3 Comments

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, Intel builds up its graphic chip capability solely through its in-house development effort without acquiring the know how through acquisitions of other graphics companies. In comparison, AMD has obtained its graphics chip capabilities through the acquisition of ATI in 2006.

Compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon which use proprietary graphics-focused cores, Larrabee will use the popular x86 cores with x86 instruction sets, much like a mulit-core CPU. However, Larrabee’s cores will be much simpler than the Core 2 Duo’s cores. It is being designed explicitly for stream processing and rasterized 3D graphics (DirectX/OpenGL) for games. It is also capable of performing ray tracing and physics processing in real time. Another interesting fact is that the design of Larrabee was coming from Intel’s previous Pentium 4 design team (Ref).

You may call Larrabee a GPU, or a mutli-core CPU or whatever. But the truth is the difference between GPU and CPU is now blurring.

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Jul

15

iPhone 3G Teardown

Filed Under Related Industry, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

iPhone 3G was launched over the last weekend. Within 3 days, more than a million iPhone 3G have been sold (Ref). The iPhone 3G manic is simply amazing and Apple has demonstrated once again its unbeatable marketing prowess. Minutes after the launch, the Internet has published a couple of articles on the teardown analysis of iPhone 3G handset. Based on these articles, we list a summary of the components used by iPhone 3G over here (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3):

  • ARM Processor: Samsung
  • 3G Communication: Infineon (previously Broadcom)
  • GPS: Infineon
  • NAND: Toshiba (previously Samsung)
  • Baseband NOR: Numonyx
  • Audio Codec: Wolfson Microelectronics
  • Power Amplifier: TriQuint
  • Power Control: NXP
  • Battery and USB: Linear Technology
  • Touchscreen: Broadcom, NXP, TI
  • Others: Skyworks

The clear winner is obviously Infineon which has four design wins in the iPhone 3G, including the 3G communication chip. Below is a two part teardown anaysis by Semiconductor Insight.

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