Month: June 2019

Apple has hired an experienced CPU designer to join its team. Mike Filippo joined Apple last month with the title Architect, according to his LinkedIn profile. The move ends a decade spent at ARM, where he was lead architect on several chip products. Filippo also spent time working on CPUs at Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The hire is a big get for Apple. ARM is responsible for technology that powers the A series chips Apple has been using in its mobile devices. For instance, the A12X in the iPad Pro springboards off the big.LITTLE architecture from ARM.

“Mike was a long-time valuable member of the ARM community,” a representative from ARM toldBloomberg. “We appreciate all of his efforts and wish him well in his next endeavor.” Apple has not commented on the hire.

The industry has been buzzing for years now that Apple is interested in making CPUs for Macs. Filippo’s resume shows work on CPUs for desktop and mobile products, which means he brings flexibility to Apple. But the company has not given any official statements about an in-house CPU for Macs, so we can only speculate about his exact role.

According to a Bloomberg report from April 2018, a plan for Macs with Apple-designed CPUs was allegedly greenlit by the company’s leadership and could be behind products shipping as soon as 2020. The company’s WWDC conference this year came and went without any mention of that rumored development, however. Whatever the date, the addition of Filippo’s experience could be helpful in making progress on this plan that may or may not be happening.

It’s also key to remember that, even though Apple building CPUs for Mac seems like a given, the company may be applying Filippo’s skills to other places. A key architect behind Apple’s A series mobile CPUs, Gerard Williams III, departed the company earlier this year, so Apple may be looking to Filippo to fill some part of that gap. Additionally, Apple has been a driving force in augmented reality and is reportedly interested in new hardware that would center on AR and VR. That’s a space where making its own processor would also be deeply useful.

Sony has a simple, straightforward way to entice would-be Xperia 1 buyers in the US: offer a bundle that might be hard to refuse. The tech giant is starting American pre-orders on June 28th, and those who purchase ahead of the July 12th release will get a pair of the company’s WH-1000XM3headphones at no extra cost — that’s $350 of (frankly excellent) wireless audio for free. If you’re buying the Xperia 1 to watch movies mid-flight or stream music during your commute, you might have everything you need.

Of course, Sony can afford to do this in part because the phone costs a hefty $950. You’ll still be getting quite a bit for the money between the super-long 6.5-inch 4K OLED screen, a camera system with eye autofocusing and Dolby Atmos audio. However, the price is still tough to swallow in a country where Sony phones are still quite rare. The headphones should make the Xperia 1 more palatable, even if you have concerns about the usefulness of that 21:9 ratio display or the relatively modest 3,300mAh battery.

A new feature in an upcoming version of Apple’s iOS will enable iPhones to look at images and identify which parts of that picture are cats or dogs.

The feature isn’t for the public. It’s for developers to build image recognition features into their apps.

Apple has been investing a lot of resources into computer vision, which is a core underlying technology for self-driving cars and augmented reality.

A new feature in an upcoming version of Apple’s iOS will enable iPhones to look at images and identify which parts of that picture are cats or dogs.

The software, called VNAnimalDetector, basically draws a digital rectangle around any part of a photograph containing an animal and labels it as either a cat or dog.

The software shows Apple’s continued efforts to take complicated and tricky machine learning techniques, and package them as part of the iPhone operating system.

It also emphasizes Apple’s large investment into computer vision, a subset of computer science that focuses on enabling cameras and other sensors to “see” and understand the real world. Computer vision is also a core underlying technology for self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses.

The detector also suggests that Apple is very aware of how many pictures of their fuzzy friends iPhone users take. Apple’s Photos app has been able to identify cats and dogs from user photos since 2016.

The software is part of Apple’s Vision framework, which gives developers tools for image recognition, and it isn’t intended for end users. Instead, the Vision framework is designed to be built into apps. Apple also built a detector for humans, which can take an image as input, and draw rectangles around any people in the picture.

It was previously possible to identify cats or people using machine learning. Lots of computer scientists and big companies have made pet detectors in the past. But VNAnimalDetector makes it easier to build into apps, in as little as four lines of code, according to a presentation at Apple’s annual developer’s conference earlier this month.

Other new advancements in the Vision framework include the ability to identify whether two images are similar, additional facial recognition abilities and the ability to identify which objects are in a photo, even if they’re not pets.

Additional technical information about the Vision API is available on Apple’s website. Additional cat photos can be found all over the internet.

The Galaxy Note 10 is launching soon, complete with a brand new design and a few novel features, but this Samsung flagship will be at least as expensive as the Galaxy S10 series that launched earlier this year. And if you’re gunning for a 5G version of the Note 10, then you’ll have to pay even more.

But Samsung is also doing something it hasn’t done before; it’s working on a brand new flagship device that won’t be as expensive as the S10 or Note 10. Moreover, this rumored Galaxy A90 phone will deliver 5G connectivity as well as 45W charging speeds — something that hasn’t been available on any Samsung flagship to date.

Leaks from the usual suspects say the Galaxy A90 will run on the same Qualcomm processor that powers some of the Galaxy S10 and Note 10 versions, including the 5G models. That’s the Snapdragon 855, of course — a chip found inside many of this year’s Android flagships.

Both A90 models will also feature 6.7-inch displays with in-display fingerprint sensors, according to @OnLeaks, as well as triple lens cameras. However, the camera specs won’t be identical. Also interesting is that the 5G phone won’t have whatever Tilt optical image stabilization, whereas the 4G version will get it.

Unlike the other Samsung flagships, the A90 isn’t supposed to feature a front-facing camera. Instead, the triple-lens camera will have a pop-up rotary design which will let you use it for both selfies and regular photos.

The other leaker that has referenced the Galaxy A90 in the past is Ice Universe, and he also mentioned the same Snapdragon 855 SoC for the phone:

Previous leaks also claimed that the Galaxy A90 will get 45W fast charging, which is even faster than what the Galaxy S10 can do. We’ve seen conflicting rumors about the Note 10’s battery charging speed, with Ice saying that the Pro version of the phone might still support 45W, while the regular model will only support 25W.

That said, we have no idea how much the Galaxy A90 phones will cost or when they’ll be available. The Galaxy Note 10, meanwhile, is expected to hit stores in the second half of August.

Something to look forward to: Microsoft’s Surface line owes a big part of its success to Intel’s CPUs, but the company has been playing with competing silicon in its labs, possibly paving the way for an AMD-powered Surface laptop. The Redmond giant’s longstanding relationship with Intel is said to be less than rosy due to the Skylake blunder and is looking to diversify the chips it’ll use in upcoming devices.

Microsoft is expected to unveil new Surface devices later this year and into the next, and while many enthusiasts are looking forward to see the mysterious dual-screen Surface that’s been passed around internally, the most interesting development might come in the form of an AMD-powered Surface laptop, with similar looks to the previous generation design and a USB-C port instead of the proprietary Surface Connect.

In a new report on Petri, long-time Microsoft watcher Brad Sams noted that a 12nm AMD Picasso SoC is one of the options explored by the company to reduce its reliance on Intel chips.

AMD’s APUs already power Xbox, so a closer partnership that extends to laptops is something enthusiasts have been dreaming about for years – a Zen+ CPU core coupled with a Vega GPU at the heart of the upcoming Surface laptop.

Sams says the Redmond giant is also cooking up custom ARM-based silicon with Qualcomm for its upcoming Surface Pro code-named Excalibur, possibly a derivative of the powerful Snapdragon 8cx we’ve seen in extensive benchmarks against Intel’s i5 8250u. Judging by the official info on the 8cx Compute Platform, this could be a boon for enterprises looking for 5G, full hypervisor support, and a host of security features.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft is giving up on Intel for larger members of the Surface family, but seeing as the company is looking at both Qualcomm and AMD, the tech giant will have to work hard to keep up in the consumer market, and a recent internal memo proves it’s starting to take AMD’s recent innovations more seriously.