Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung Begins Production For Its First Internet of Things-optimised Exynos Processor (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the for-connected-future dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung Electronics has launched the Exynos i T200, its first processor optimised for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the company has announced. The South Korean tech giant said the chip has upped security and supports wireless connections, with hopes of giving it an advantage in the expanding IoT market. The Exynos i T200 applies Samsung's 28-nanometer High-K Metal Gate process and has multiple cores, with the Cortex-R4 doing the heavy lifting and an independently operating Cortex-M0+ allowing for multifunctionality. For example, if applied to a refrigerator, Cotext-R4 will run the OS and Cotex-M0+ will power LED displays on the doors.

33 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

    Why would anyone want their refrigerator connected to ANY network? It is a cold box to store food in. Are people really that lazy now that they need their fridge to tell them when they are running out of eggs?

    1. Re:Why? by sunking2 · · Score: 1

      Excluding all the perfect people on Slashdot, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't had to 'run back to the store' upon finding out they needed something they thought they had in the fridge, or bought something they didn't actually need. Not saying its worth the cost, but the use cases certainly exist.

    2. Re:Why? by sinij · · Score: 2

      Every time I check my fridge from my app I see some weird old man stretching his anus. How did he manage to stretch it that far all while fitting inside my fridge?

    3. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Who cares what the consumer wants when anything can become a sustained source of revenue. Where there is a internet connection and a screen, there is ad revenue to be made.

    4. Re:Why? by edxwelch · · Score: 1

      I think the reason they have a fridge connected to the internet, is because they *can* connect a fridge to the internet. There doesn't need to be a reason.

    5. Re:Why? by Charlotte · · Score: 4, Funny

      Do you buy a lot of goat related products?

    6. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Why the fuck does a refrigerator need an operating system?

    7. Re:Why? by Chrisq · · Score: 2

      Why the fuck does a refrigerator need an operating system?

      Filtering out the spam

    8. Re:Why? by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      A fridge capable of doing that would need to be pretty smart. It would have to be able to track contents going and and out of it and know what the hell it is, which means it needs a scanner that can read bar codes (no matter how the object is situated) or scan RFID tags on the items, but really it would need some visual recognition since just because it sees a milk carton in the fridge doesn't mean that it's not almost empty.

      Doing that is going to be incredibly complex and requires solving a lot of problems that are the focus of current AI research. Right now I expect that the best a smart fridge is capable of is telling me how cold it is (or allowing me to change that) and whether or not there's ice ready in the freezer. Maybe it could do some fancy stuff like having temperature zones so part of the fridge can be kept cooler than another part, but having a fridge that knows what's in it and can automatically add stuff to a shopping list is going to take a while to achieve.

    9. Re: Why? by Entrope · · Score: 1

      Temperature control can be a little fuzzy without spoiling food. If the sun is shining, maybe the refrigerator keeps running until it hits 37 degrees F; if it's cloudy, it stops at 39 F, in hopes that it will be sunny again soon.

    10. Re:Why? by kfh227 · · Score: 1

      Sadly, the fridges will probably need to by connected In the future as the control systems will become OS driven, thus needing patches. #IHateTechnolgoy

    11. Re:Why? by sunking2 · · Score: 1

      Or a picture of the various shelves. Don't over complicate things. It's not that hard.

    12. Re:Why? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I don't give two shits whether my fridge can order things for me or not, because I probably won't use that functionality, but it is a convenient place to put a computer for recipes and such.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re:Why? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      I connected a coffee maker to the internet in the early 90's.

  2. Who decided to use the term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Internet of Things"?

    When you say it aloud, it sounds absolutely retarded (in the low IQ sense), and the name is wildly obtuse, only vaguely hinting at what it refers to.

    I propose a new name: "Internet Networked Devices"

    1. Re:Who decided to use the term by Jamu · · Score: 1

      I prefer "Interconnected Internet Networked Device Things or Objects".

      --
      Who ordered that?
    2. Re:Who decided to use the term by cloud.pt · · Score: 1

      Good luck selling that to genpop

  3. Is it Open source friendly? by niftymitch · · Score: 1

    Is it Open source friendly?
    If not all the vendors that buy it will end up using
    opaque binary blobs that are crazy difficult to update and audit.
    Even if it is Linux based software...

    The patchwork of ARM SOC hardware has such a tangle
    of secret IP that there be a lot more dragons there than even
    the Raspberry Pi folk (I am a fan) are commonly aware.

    The Pandaboard is one example of such a dead end.
    TI pulled the plug on the handful of contractors maintaining it
    and now progress is totally stuck and the graphics never
    what it should have been.

    --
    Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
    1. Re:Is it Open source friendly? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 1

      My microwave oven has a microcontroller with an 'opaque binary blob' in it and it heats up oatmeal just fine. I wouldn't want it to do anything else.

      I would hope that these things will be open, but I don't expect it.

      Really, the Raspberry Pi hackers need to reverse engineer the stuff in the 'closed' controllers and replace them. Perhaps that will be more and more possible as time goes on.

      I could get to like being able to dig into the controller on my Microwave Oven and adding functionality that would like (which wouldn't include the oatmeal company keeping track of how long I cook my oatmeal.)

    2. Re:Is it Open source friendly? by Charlotte · · Score: 1

      The Pandaboard is one example of such a dead end.

      The Banana Pi is another. Avoid it.

    3. Re:Is it Open source friendly? by Charlotte · · Score: 1

      Really, the Raspberry Pi hackers need to reverse engineer the stuff in the 'closed' controllers and replace them.

      That is illegal due to the DMCA.

    4. Re:Is it Open source friendly? by dwywit · · Score: 1

      More to the point, closed source products from Samsung appear to trying to hide stuff like this:
      https://www.theguardian.com/en...

      Just why, in the light of the VW et al diesel emissions testing scandal, do manufacturers continue to act like we trust them?

      Oh, right, because consumers continue to buy their products.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  4. fix the link please by celeb8 · · Score: 1

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/s... --- was that it?

  5. Please fix typos by Tomahawk · · Score: 3, Funny

    @editor, please fix the typos in that summary. "Cortex" is spelt 3 different ways... (wrong twice in the last sentence: Cotext and Cotex)
    tnx

    1. Re:Please fix typos by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      You're right, when they wrote Cotex they meant Kotex, which you need to insert to stop the rectal bleeding caused by seeing yet another announcement of an IoT PoS.

    2. Re:Please fix typos by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      Language changes (even within a sentence), deal with it. You should be able to infer a word's meaning from its cotext, by using the little grey cells in your cotex.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  6. Dual processors like this are a bad idea by randomErr · · Score: 2

    With the two processors running separate OS's one can be hijacked and run malware or worse without the other processor even knowing. Didn't they learn anything from Intel?

    --
    You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
    1. Re:Dual processors like this are a bad idea by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Learn what from Intel? That a bug in a feature is exploitable? In the meantime there are thousands of platforms out there with independent microprocessors dedicated to different tasks with different performance at the same time. Remember the Math Co-processor? How about most ASIC or FPGA based systems with an ARM microcontroller on the side? You probably have several such devices inside your house right now and drawing any comparisons between this and Intel is just silly.

    2. Re:Dual processors like this are a bad idea by sunking2 · · Score: 1

      Because the average slashdotter hasn't a clue about how electronics actually work.

    3. Re:Dual processors like this are a bad idea by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Cellphones already have two processors running separate OSes. The cellular modem has it's own ARM cores.

  7. correcting blatently bad information by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    Spam is the very manna that John Frum brought to the islands on the silver birds. It is the perfect food and requires no refrigeration. Grill it up, maybe add some pineapple or some soy sauce and you're good to go.

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  8. The M68020 was first by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

    it wasn't called iot back then. It beat the 386 by a year.

  9. Can they make a Beowulf Cluster of Fridges? by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

    Bringing back the "good ol days" of Slashdot.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user