[Updated: June 1] — Freescale announced an heir to its i.MX51 family of ARM Cortex-A8 SoCs that boosts video decode performance to 1080p HD. The i.MX535 processor offers 720p video encode, up to 2GB of external memory, and improved peripheral support including new DDR3, SATA, and LVDS, and is compatible with Android, Linux, Windows Embedded CE, and Chromium.

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Intel says it will launch dedicated silicon for tablet PCs at next week's Computex show in Taiwan. The Atom-based chipset — likely bearing the “Moorestown-W” moniker — will run a tablet-specific version of Windows 7 that supports power-saving “SmartIdle” technology, according to various reports.

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Next week at Computex, Via Technologies' WonderMedia Technologies subsidiary will demonstrate low-cost Android-based tablets based on the ARM9-based, 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm processor and related “SmartTouch” reference designs. The tablets will be manufactured by a variety of Chinese manufacturers, and sold for as low as $100 in the U.S. later this year, says Bloomberg.

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Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) announced a military-focused 3U OpenVPX-compliant VPX-REDI SBC equipped with Freescale's PowerPC-based, eight-core 1.5GHz QorIQ P4080 system-on-chip. The XPedite5470 offers PCI Express or Serial RapidIO expansion, SERDES or standard gigabit Ethernet ports, plus MIL-STD 810F Level 1-5 ruggedization and temperature resistance, says the company.

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CSR says it's now shipping a Linux-compatible SoC (system on chip) incorporating an ARM11-based application processor and a 64-channel GPS engine. The SiRFatlasV offers 500 or 664MHz clock speeds, supports VGA-resolution video, supports DDR2-400 RAM, and includes an on-chip audio DAC and power management unit (PMU), the company says.

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One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and Marvell have agreed to develop next-generation OLPC XO-3 tablets based on the Marvell Moby reference design and the Armada 610 SoC. Aimed at the worldwide educational market, the Moby-based XO devices will support 1080p video encode and decode, 3D graphics, Flash 10-enabled web access, and teleconferencing, and consume only a single Watt, say the partners.

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Acer announced an Android 2.1 smartphone called the Stream, offering a 1GHz Snapdragon, a 3.7-inch AMOLED WVGA display, and a five-megapixel camera. At the device's Chinese launch, the company also showed off a LumiRead e-reader with a 6-inch grayscale display, WiFi, 3G, and an ISBN scanner, and provided a brief glimpse of a seven-inch Android tablet.

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BeagleBoard.org has tipped a new version of its open-platform development board for hobbyists, sporting a faster 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 SoC and twice the memory. The BeagleBoard-xM runs an upcoming Texas Instruments “DM3730” processor with 512MB of low-power DDR RAM, and a new on-board, four-port USB hub with 10/100 Ethernet, all in a 3.25 × 3.25-inch footprint.

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The Intel- and Nokia-backed MeeGo project released version 1.0 of an open source operating system optimized for Intel Atom-based netbooks. MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks — which we found to be speedy — comprises Google's Chrome browser, Nokia's Qt 4.6, plus a variety of other tools, and will be followed next month by a handset version, says the project.

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Aaeon announced a PC/104 CPU module equipped with the Intel Atom N450 processor. The PFM-LNP supports simultaneous dual-view displays, has an 18-bit single channel LVDS interface, provides PCI/104 and Mini-PCIe expansion, and offers gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and serial connectivity, says the company.

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Intel has, “at least in the short term,” canceled its plans to bring a discrete GPU (graphics processing unit) to market. The move follows the company's having missed “key product milestones” for a planned product codenamed Larrabee, spokesperson Bill Kircos wrote in a blog entry yesterday.

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Google released version 5.0 of its Chrome web browser — including the first stable builds for Linux and Mac platforms — promising faster performance plus new multi-machine sync and HTML5 utilities. Meanwhile, tech pundit Om Malik suggests that Google's Linux- and Chrome-based Chrome OS should step aside to let the fast-growing Android evolve.

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Wind River announced a new version of its Linux-ready, multicore oriented Simics virtualization and simulation software for embedded hardware development. Wind River Simics 4.4 adds a GUI-enabled “Analyzer” application for evaluating a virtual representation of the target hardware, as well as an extension builder that exposes Simics APIs for customization and plugin development, says the company.

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Dell says its Streak mini-tablet — featuring a five-inch touchscreen, voice telephony, the Android operating system, and a Snapdragon processor — will begin shipping next month. Meanwhile, Opera Software announced an Android-ready, “touch-optimized” tablet version of its Opera Mobile 10 browser.

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eWEEK evaluated a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and a beta Flash Player 10.1, and found Flash to be slow loading, but surprisingly smooth and power efficient. Meanwhile, HTC vows that most of its Android phones will move to version 2.2 later this year, and a 4Q release for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) has been tipped.

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