Intel Pushing for Better Battery Life with a 40 Percent More Efficient GPU

Battery life on our phones and tablets are a pretty largely talked about topic. You see a ton of screenshots floating around forums, Twitter, G+ and others that show terrible life and outstanding life. Usually the outstanding life images are from a highly-modified device that has been rooted, flashed with a custom ROM and kernel. That isn’t for everyone though. Plenty of users just want a solid device out of the box that lasts 12 to 16 hours. Sure, there have been some devices that do that, the DROID RAZR MAXX comes to mind, so does the Lenovo Yoga 8. Intel has been making strides in the right direction with they Bay Trail and Haswell chips, but they aren’t stopping with just the processor when it comes to lowering power consumption.

Intel is now demonstrating a 22nm tri-gate GPU that they say is 40% more efficient and offers the same performance as the current GPU plus improves the performance when you need it. The GPU core is also designed to go into standby mode much quicker thus saving even more bits of juice.

“First, it is well known that the best way to reduce power is to reduce voltage, so Intel’s graphics cores are designed to take advantage of our 22nm tri-gate transistor technology which allows high-performance operation even as voltage is lowered.  However even with these advanced transistors, some specialized circuits (such as memory arrays) inside the graphics core can still limit the minimum voltage (called Vmin) which can be used.  Therefore this design demonstrates a new “selective boosting” technique which uses a slightly higher “boosted” voltage for key parts of Vmin-limiting memory arrays in the core.  What does this accomplish?  By dynamically boosting only small parts of the core, the rest of the core can go to even lower voltage – giving dramatic energy efficiency improvements.

There is a whole lot more tech behind it of course. Using techniques like adaptive clocking to reduce safety margin detecting and and keep droops out of the loop and various other things that I am extremely under qualified to even attempt to offer up.

At the end of the day, what is all means in a much more efficient GPU that can deliver the same, if not better, graphics to your devices screen. In short, making your battery last a whole lot longer. Hit up the link below to get the full story from Intel.

Source & Img: Intel Via Liliputing

MT6595 Octa-Core ARM Cortex A17 Processor Unveiled by MediaTek

MediaTek might be a name that you aren’t all that pleased with, or one you might even really know about. In the U.S., the primary chips we see in our Android powered devices are usually Qualcomm or NVIDIA. There are some Intel ones running around too. MediaTek usually popped up in Chinese variant devices, knock-offs or the likes. The processor manufacturer has just unveiled their next big thing though, a Octa-Core ARM Cortex A17 chip, called the MT6595.

The new octo-core MT6595 is said to be the first of its kind to have Category 4 LTE support falling back to HSPA+ 42. This makes it a prime candidate for AT&T and T-Mobile here in the states. All built along with Ultra HD H.265 video capabilities. The MT6595 boasts 4 ARM Cortex A17 cores and 4 lower-powered ARM Cortex A7 cores. Giving the processor high performance when needed, but battery saving abilities when idle and during remedial task.

The 6595 also sports PowerVR Series6 graphics, 4k video recording, 24bit 192 kHz audio playback and is designed for device displays that push up-to 2560 x 1600. MediaTek also says the new chip is the first to support 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Not to mention support for Bluetooth LE, ANT+ and multimode wireless charging receiver.

From the sounds of it all, the new MT6595 could start appearing in various devices by the second half of 2014. With PCMag talking under $200 for high-res screens and all the other goodies mentioned above.

“There is really no good reason why phones with good displays should cost $700-800,” Bhushan said. “For $100-200, we can provide phones based on platforms like this one.”

After having my hands on a MediaTek powered Lenovo Yoga 8 tablet (which houses a MTK 8125 Quad-Core A7 ) , I can say that I am pretty happy with the performance. It isn’t a NVIDIA SHIELD, or iPad Air, but it wasn’t supposed to be. The MediaTek processor handles everything I throw at it, including Modern Combat 4 and Dead Trigger 2. It should be interesting to see where the new MT6595 chip lands. We don’t expect to see HTC or Motorola starting to use them anytime soon, but a next gen Yoga tablet or some of the more interesting non name brand phones could see some success with one.

Source: MediaTek