MIPS-based $99 tablet with Android 4.0 announced

On December 5, MIPS Technologies, Inc. and Ingenic Semiconductor announced the world's first tablet with "Ice Cream Sandwich" version of Android, or, more officially, Android 4.0. The new Novo7 tablet utilizes MIPS-compatible JZ4770 system-on-a-chip (Soc), developed and produced by Ingenic Semiconductor. The 7" tablet boasts 300 hours standby time on one battery charge, and can last up to 6 hours when playing games, and up to 8 hours when playing video. The Novo7 device has capacitive multi-touch screen, dual front-and rear cameras, 2D and 3D graphics support, 1080p decoding, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n support, USB 2,0, HDMI 1.3 and a few other interfaces, and it retails for less than $100.

The heart of the new tablet is Ingenic JZ4770 application processor, clocked at 1 GHz. This 14mm x 14mm (0.55" x 0.55") chip integrates XBurst1 CPU with 8-stage pipeline and dual-cache architecture, as well video and graphics units, DDR/LPDDR/DDR2 memory controller, and a large number of interfaces and chipset components, like timers, Real Time clock, and others. XBurst1 CPU is compatible with MIPS32, and can natively handle Floating Point and SIMD instructions. Main advantages of the XBurst1 core are small size and very low power consumption. Manufactured on 65nm process, the core with 16 KB instruction and 16 KB L1 data caches takes only 1.7 mm² of die area, and consumes less than 0.09W at 1GHz. The JZ4770 SoC also incorporates 256 KB level 2 cache. Video Processing Unit on the JZ4770 supports decoding of several formats, including H.264, MPEG-2, MPEC-4, VP8, at resolutions up to 1080p, and H.264 encoding with 720p resolution. Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) handles 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, and can work with small screens, as well as HD 1080p displays. The GPU supports OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 and Open VG APIs. Other peripheral and interface units on the SoC include LCD and EPD controllers, camera interface module, AC97/I2S/SPDIF controller, audio CODEC, PCM interfaces, general-purpose I/O ports, USB 1.1 and 2.0, Ethernet MAC, and several other communication interfaces.

The new 7" tablet is now available in China from Ainol Electronics Co, Ltd. for less than $100. The tablet will be available in the US and other countries within the next few months under different brands. Tablets with 8" and 9" form factors are also planned.