Nvidia Reveals Kal-El’s Secret Fifth Core For Ultra-Low-Power Tasks

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

There has been a lot of whispering about Nvidia’s next-generation Tegra chip, code-named Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name, for the uninitiated), since it was first detailed on a roadmap back in Februrary. But it hasn’t shown up quite yet in any actual handsets or tablets, though we’re told it has been adopted by the majors and will have its debut soon.

Nvidia today released some new information about the SoC that confirms Tegra’s status as the brand to beat in the mobile computing world. Turns out it’s not quad-core, it’s penta-core. And the “companion core” is designed to take over while all the others go to sleep.

As you have probably suspected, load balancing and optimizing processor use is important to the battery life of many devices. The screen is usually a bigger draw, but with demand for CPU- and GPU-intensive content rising, the portion of a battery used for that processing is as well. But when you’re not playing games or watching HD movies on your phone, those high-power cores don’t operate as efficiently as one designed for low-power, low-priority tasks. So Nvidia put another one on the die, a low-power optimized core, that takes over for mundane things like notification monitoring while the phone is inactive, low-bandwidth stuff like e-reading, and so on.

Nvidia explains it all in this handy diagram, though be on the watch for self-congratulatory jargon (“console-class gaming” isn’t an industry standard term):

It’s a bit like having a city car and a hot rod in your garage. You don’t want to drive your Aston Martin in bumper-to-bumper traffic. That’s why you have a Civic too, or perhaps a Leaf. Same here. Why use ten times the CPU power necessary to perform a simple task?

You can read the rest in Nvidia’s whitepaper (PDF), but take it with a grain of salt, because TI might have some tricks up its sleeve, and even Intel might be creeping up.

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BoltJS: Another Secret Piece Of Facebook’s Spartan Puzzle?

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

After a steady stream of information in June, all has been quiet on the Facebook Project Spartan front in recent weeks. Originally, at least some thought the plan was to unveil Spartan in July — but that obviously came and went. It’s certainly possible we won’t hear anything until f8 in late September now. But one new bit of information has come to our attention that could be related. Say hello to BoltJS.

BoltJS is a UI framework that’s being built by Facebook for the purpose “helping developers build fantastic mobile web applications in HTML5 and Javascript,” as you can read for yourself here. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the browser, meaning no backend processing is required. And guess where the focus of the project lies right now: mobile WebKit browsers — just like Project Spartan.

Here’s the description in developer Shane O’Sullivan’s own words from the project’s GitHub page:

BoltJS is a UI framework designed by Facebook to be compact, fast and powerful. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the browser, needing no server backend. While BoltJS can be used in a progressive enhancement approach, it is primarily designed for UIs that are built mostly, if not completely, in the browser.

While it is the aim of the BoltJS project to support as many modern browsers as sensible, it is currently focused on supporting mobile WebKit browsers, with the intention of being the best possible development platform for mobile sites and HTML5 apps.

O’Sullivan is a software engineer at Facebook on the Client UI team. The other authors of the project are Will Bailey, Vlad Kolesnikov, and Tom Occhino.

BoltJS is built on top of Javelin, and plays nicely with Facebook’s current code, O’Sullivan notes. It also features modules that use the CommonJS standard. For all the other technical details, check out the GitHub docs page.

But here are a few other interesting things about the project. First, Facebook doesn’t seem to want to say a word about it. I asked them about it several hours ago after a back and forth about something else. So far, nada in response to this. That’s not surprising given what I’ve been told about BoltJS — namely that it’s still meant to be a secret.

While the documentation does reside on GitHub, the source code hasn’t been released to the public yet. The links on this page to the zip and tar source files don’t work. But I’m told that BoltJS is already being licensed secretly to third parties who are preparing apps to show off using the platform. At least one of those third parties is a major player in the consumer web space. Again, this sounds a lot like Spartan.

Also found on GitHub is a demo app built using BoltJS called “Weather App“. If it looks familiar, it’s because you own an iPhone. It is essentially the Weather app re-created using the JavaScript framework. Still think Facebook doesn’t intend to battle with Apple in mobile down the road?…

That’s all for now. More as we get it.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It...

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Reddit Acquires Fan-Made Secret Santa Site, RedditGifts

Greg Kumparak is the editor of MobileCrunch.com, a mobile industry blog within the TechCrunch Network. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born in the outskirts of San Jose, CA, and now lives in the East Bay. ? Learn More

After spending far too much time with far too little support from their owners at Condé Nast, Reddit is on a bit of a roll lately. They’ve gone on a handful of hiring sprees this year, moved into a bigger, better office… and now, they’ve made their first acquisition: RedditGifts.

For the non-Redditors out there (yeah, yeah, Narwhal bacons at Midnight and all that), RedditGifts is a user-to-user gift exchange service first launched by Redditor kickme444 for Reddit’s record-breaking Secret Santa back in 2009.

In each “Secret Santa” event, Redditors are automatically matched with one other Redditor, and are then tasked with figuring out something awesome to send that person’s way. Some lurk through their recipient’s comments for clues as to what they might like; others just make something neat and hope it works out. There are, of course, horror stories of people scamming the process for free crap and other tomfoolery — but for the most part, everyone plays friendly and it works out well.

Following the success of the first Secret Santa round (which pulled around 4,500 participants), RedditGifts followed up with a second in 2010, this time with over 17,000 gift-givers. Looking to keep the fun going outside of December, they also organized the totally secular and aptly named “Arbitrary Day”, which they describe as “a celebration of nothing in particular”. All gift exchanges combined, just shy of 43,000 people have participated, with around $1.5 million (plus a ton of man-hours, as so many of the gifts are handmade) spent on gifts.

So, why the acquisition? What’s in it for Reddit? In short, RedditGifts’ two-person team just couldn’t afford to keep maintaining the project while also working their day jobs.. so now RedditGifts is their day job. Reddit gets to keep an awesome, well-established, largely-self-driven source of community bonding, and the RedditGifts team gets to do what they were doing before… but for money. Everyone wins!

RedditGifts will continue to operate under the same two-person team (Dan “kickme444? McComas and Jessica “5days” Moreno), remain on the same domain, and neither will be involved with the daily operations of Reddit proper. The only things expected to change: RedditGifts will eventually go opensource (Reddit already is), and the whole thing should lead to better integration (namely, easier sign-ups) in the longrun.

No word yet if any money (beyond salaries, benefits and the like) actually traded hands for this acquisition, or if this is more of an acquisition-by-hire — either way, it’s not a bad deal for a project initially launched overnight on a whim.

Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on your personal preferences and what the community likes. Your preferences are determined based on your...

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