Europe to use ARM CPUs and GPUs to make an exaflop supercomputer 30-50x more energy efficient than the best supercomputers today
In 2011 the Mont Blanc project announced that it could design a higher performing, more energy efficient standard of computer architecture by using the processor technology found in today's embedded and mobile devices. Using the Exynos 5 Dual with its ARM® Mali™-T604 GPU as the basis of their prototype, their new machines are predicted to be able to carry out ten to the power of eighteen operations a second whilst being fifteen to thirty times more energy efficient than the systems used today and are set to completely revolutionize HPC technology.
Next Big Future covered the history of the project to date in this article.
New smartphone market data shows strong growth for entry-level and Android OS-based devices
Worldwide smartphone sales will reach 1.2bn by the end of 2014, an increase of 23.1% over the previous year, according to the latest report from IDC Research, and it is the entry-level market in emerging countries such as India, Indonesia and Russia that is especially drawing the attention of industry analysts. Average selling prices are starting to decrease with a smartphone now expected to sell at $314, but they are also offering far better value for this price as premium technology from previous years becomes affordable to the mass market. In addition, Android is set to continue its leadership, hitting an 80.2% market share by the end of 2014. This is encouraging news for Mali, whose GPU IP is found in over 50% of Android tablets and over 20% of all Android smartphones.
This week's Mali-based device launches
This week saw the launch of the Vodafone Smart Tab 4 into the UK market, an 8 inch tablet with a MediaTek MT8382 processor featuring a quad core ARM Cortex®-A7 CPU and a Mali-400 GPU. Acer announced four new Mediatek based tablets, featuring ARM Mali GPUs, set to be launched in the third quarter of this year. In addition the Alcatel OneTouch Idol X+ and the Wickedleak Wammy Neo with their Mali-450 GPUs were launched into the Indian market and the Huawei Honor 3C with its Mediatek MT6592 was launched in Pakistan.