Freescale recently released the i.MX6 Series of ARM SoC for industrial and mobile computing. This new SoC is based on ARMv7 Cortex-A9 MP architecture, that can scale from 1 to 4 core(s), clocked at up to 1.2 GHz, obviously also featuring a complete 2D/3D GPU based on Vivante GC400 engine, supporting OpenVG, OpenGL|ES 1.x and 2.x and OpenCL hardware acceleration APIs. The Freescale i.MX6 also provides a complete Multimedia Codecs API, allowing 1080p H.264/VC-1 video encoding/decoding.

At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8.

ZiiLabs says it is sampling a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC (system-on-chip) designed for Android 4.0 tablets. Clocked at 1.5GHz, the ZMS-40 processor is equipped with 96 “StemCell” media processing cores supporting 3840 x 1080 resolution for 1080p 3D stereo video, features 200-megapixel/sec image processing, and supports the new HEVC (H.265) video compression standard, the company says.ZiiLabs says it is sampling a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC (system-on-chip) designed for Android 4.0 tablets. Clocked at 1.5GHz, the ZMS-40 processor is equipped with 96 “StemCell” media processing cores supporting 3840 x 1080 resolution for 1080p 3D stereo video, features 200-megapixel/sec image processing, and supports the new HEVC (H.265) video compression standard, the company says.

ARM announced its big.LITTLE technology on 19th October and Linaro were invited to participate in both the London and San Francisco launches. It is interesting technology, with two clusters of Cortex ARMv7 architecture cores (Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7) joined together via a coherent interconnect. ARM has proposed two usage models, task migration and MP.

The performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 OMAP4460 configuration as found on the PandaBoard ES is quite commendable and in this Phoronix review the dual-core 1.2GHz ARM system with PowerVR SGX540 graphics is being compared to several Intel Atom, Pentium M, and Core Duo configurations running Ubuntu Linux throughout. To spice things up, the pre-production OLPC XO-1.75 was also thrown into the testing mix with its single-core ARMv7 800MHz Sheeva processor.

There has been a lot written about the possibility of Microsoft not supporting the Windows 8 Desktop environment on the ARM architecture. If true, this could impact Microsoft, ARM and ARM’s licensees and Texas Instruments, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm are in the best position to challenge the high end of the ARM stack and are publicly supported by Microsoft. One question that hasn’t been explored is, why would Microsoft even consider something like this? It’s actually quite simple and makes a lot of sense the position they’re in; it’s all about risk-return and the future of phones and living room consoles.

These days there’s been quite a bit buzz about Meizu’s long-expected MX Android phone. we’ve heard that Meizu’s dealers in China have begun to accept pre-orders for this phone a few days ago, and the phone’s rear shells were leaked in transport to Zhuhai City yesterday, but Meizu just kept silent. Now the company finally said something. Today on its official website the company fully unveiled Meizu MX.

Samsung has just unveiled a new System-on-chip (SoC) for future mobile devices. It’s the Exynos 5250 that boasts two Cortex-A15 chips clocked at 2GHz. The dual-core Exynos 5250 is created using a 32nm-low power HKMG process and is said to double the performance when compared to a 1.5GHz dual-core SoC based on Cortex-A9.

FXI Technologies announced a USB stick-sized computer that can run Android or Ubuntu on a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The “Cotton Candy” will include 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an HDMI port, the company says.

Let’s hope that this device will not infrige the last NVIDIA patent.

VIDIA expanded upon what it’d do to work with developers by noting that they’d be releasing a new hardware and software development kit for its ARM-based initiatives around the globe. This kit will of course contain a brand new quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM CPU complete with a “discrete” NVIDIA GPU, all of this available inside the first half of 2012. This kit’s hardware is being developed by SECO and will be supported by the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming toolkit. Get in on the action!