Google was among the first hyperscalers build custom silicon for its services, starting first with tensor processing units (TPUs) for its AI initiatives, and then video transcoding units (VCUs) for the YouTube service. But unlike its industry peers, the company has been slower to adopt custom CPU designs, prefering to stick to off-the-shelf chips from the major CPUs. This is finally changing at Google, with the announcement that the company has developed its own in-house datacenter CPU, the Axion. Google's Axion processor is based on the Arm Neoverse V2 (Arm v9) platform, which is Arm's current-generation design for high-performance server CPUs, and is already employed in other chips such as NVIDIA's Grace and Amazon's Graviton4. Within Google, Axion is aimed at a wide variety of...
Revisiting SHIELD Tablet: Gaming Battery Life and Temperatures
While the original SHIELD Tablet review hit most of the critical points in the review, there wasn't enough time to investigate everything. One of the areas where there wasn't...
39 by Joshua Ho & Andrei Frumusanu on 8/8/2014
Galaxy S5 LTE-A: Battery Life, Performance
While I was planning on doing a full review for the GS5 LTE-A, it turns out that there’s relatively little that changes between the original Galaxy S5 and this...
32 by Joshua Ho on 8/5/2014
The NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Review
While I talked about this in the launch article, the SHIELD Tablet is very much the culmination of lessons learned from 2013. While the Tegra Note 7 was a...
175 by Joshua Ho on 7/29/2014
Google Play App Updated to 4.9.13 With Material Design App Pages
Google has begun the rollout of an update to the Google Play application on Android. At first glance the update doesn't seem to have any big changes. The sliding...
14 by Brandon Chester on 7/22/2014
NVIDIA Launches Shield Tablet
Today, NVIDIA is announcing the Shield tablet. While normally such launch announcements don’t require much in the way of exposition, NVIDIA is in an odd place. Last year, the...
107 by Joshua Ho on 7/22/2014
Xiaomi Launches the Mi 4
Today, Xiaomi announces the next version of their flagship smartphone, the Mi 4. Much like the OnePlus One, this device is effectively a high end device at a mid-range...
16 by Joshua Ho on 7/22/2014
Manual Camera Controls and RAW in Android L
For those that have followed the state of camera software in AOSP and Google Camera in general, it’s been quite clear that this portion of the experience has been...
32 by Joshua Ho on 7/20/2014
Google Updates Chrome To Version 36
Today Google updated the stable version of its Chrome browser to version 36.0.1985.122 on Windows, OS X, and Linux. The update contains a couple of visual changes as well...
37 by Brandon Chester on 7/16/2014
Your Thoughts on the Wearables Market
For the past couple of years we've noticed a shift in focus of dominant players in the smartphone space. As the smartphone market moves from rapid expansion to a...
151 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 7/11/2014
A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L
With the latest I/O conference, Google has finally publicly made public its plans for its new runtime on Android. The Android RunTime, ART, is the successor and replacement for...
137 by Andrei Frumusanu on 7/1/2014
First Impressions and Hands On of Android L
Today, Google finally posted the system images for Android L on the Nexus 5 and 7, so I decided to take a look at them to see what’s going...
64 by Joshua Ho on 6/26/2014
Google IO 2014 Day 2 Recap Video
I just finished up another day at Google IO and wanted to share a few tidbits prior to getting this stuff down in text. I spend a little bit...
3 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/26/2014
Google IO 2014 Day 1 Recap Video
I just got back from a day at Moscone West listening to Google present updates on Android on nearly all screens. I recorded a brief video recapping some of...
10 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/25/2014
Google Announces Improvements to Google Docs at Google IO
Near the end of April I took a look at Google's new Docs and Sheets mobile applications that had been spun off of the Google Drive application. I felt...
6 by Brandon Chester on 6/25/2014
Google IO 2014 Keynote Live Blog
We will be live blogging the Google IO keynote starting at 9AM PT/12PM ET. Check back for live coverage when it starts!
25 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/25/2014
Google Launches New 2014 Google I/O App
Today Google launched the official mobile app for Google I/O which runs between June 25th and 26th of this year. The app continues Google’s trend of introducing more colors...
5 by Brandon Chester on 6/11/2014
Google Announces Project Tango Tablet Dev Kit with Tegra K1 and 3D Capture/Tracking
Google recently announced their new Project Tango Development Kit, a 7" tablet with a unique twist. At present this is a device for developers, scientists, and other research-oriented groups...
33 by Jarred Walton on 6/5/2014
Best Smartphones: Spring 2014
The major product launches for this spring are now behind us. This gives us the opportunity to evaluate the current smartphone market and identify the best smartphones in that...
46 by Brett Howse on 6/5/2014
Google Updates Maps for Android and iOS with Improvements to Offline Maps, Navigation, and More
Today Google updated its maps application for Android and iOS. Google seems confident enough in the updates that it decided to call this major release version 8.0 on Android...
30 by Brandon Chester on 5/6/2014
A quick look at Google’s new Google Docs and Sheets mobile apps
Today Google released two new applications on Google Play and the iOS App Store. The new apps are called Google Sheets and Google Docs and they are essentially standalone...
12 by Brandon Chester on 4/30/2014
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