Cellphone

To be announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, MediaTek has filled out its latest generation of phone processors. Positioned under its flagship Dimensity 9400 and premium 8400, the new 7400 and 7400X are optimised for gaming and AI camera processing. Built on TSMC’s 4nm process, both 7400 chips have an octa-core CPU: 4x 2.6GHz Arm Cortex-A78 cores and 4x ...

Mediatek has adopted Arm’s top-end Cortex-X925 CPU in its second-generation ‘all big core’ phone processor – Dimensity 9400, made by TSMC on a 3nm process. The X925 runs at up to 3.63GHz and has 2Mbyte of L2 cache, and shares the IC with three Cortex-X4 cores (1Mbyte L2 cache) and four Cortex-A720 cores (512kbyte L2 cache). These all share 12Mbyte ...

Software designed to detect child abuse images on smartphones, which could be mandated by governments in some counties, can be covertly repurposed to intrude on personal privacy, according to research at Imperial college. ‘Client-side scanning’ (CSS) is an image analysis technique based on ‘perceptual hashing’, and is mooted as a way to get around the legitimate problem of criminals hiding ...

Smartphones can be 85% accurate in identifying who is carrying them, merely by detecting motion as the person walks around normally, according to the University of Plymouth. This rises to almost 90% if they walk fast. The trial had 44 participants, aged between 18 and 56, each carrying a phone in a belt pouch for 7 to 10days. Resulting phone gyroscope ...

Canadian researchers have used mobile phone data to reveal how much out-of-home travel (dubbed ‘mobility’) is needed to cause a surge in Covid-19 cases. The team uses almost a year’s anonymised phone data (March 2020 to March 2021) to estimate on average how long people were moving outside their homes in Canada, and also noted the week-on-week increase in Covid-19 ...

23% of UK office workers say their productivity  is  hindered at least once a week by poor cellular connectivity at work.. The poll – conducted by OnePoll and commissioned by CommScope – asked 2,000 UK office workers about the relationship between mobile connectivity and their productivity when at work. 77% of respondents considered it ‘important’ for being able to complete ...

For the first time in 40 years, the computer industry will no longer be the largest market for chips, says IC Insights. This year, the largest market will be communications ICs.

ARM vendors are creeping up on x86 vendors in the latest MPU market figures from IC Insights. Eight of the top ten suppliers are ARM-based.

In a good growth year for the semiconductor industry, Q2 has the highest sequential quarterly growth rate, says IC Insights in a 30 year review of cyclical trends. In a bad growth year, H1 takes the brunt of the slowdown. When averaging the quarterly IC market growth rate figures over the past 30 years, the third quarter average increase was the ...

There are many black holes for the unwary tech CEO to fall into, but two of the oldest and blackest are video phones and pocket TV.