Asustek Computer has announced ZenFone 3 Zoom, an ultra-thin 5.5-inch smartphone with a 5000mAh battery and a dual-camera system. The ZenFone 3 Zoom features dual-camera system consists of a main camera with an f/1.7-aperture, 25mm wide-angle main lens paired to a 12-megapixel Sony IMX362 sensor with large 1.4µm pixels (1/2.55in sensor size); and a 59mm, 12-megapixel zoom camera with an instant 2.3X optical zoom and a 12X total zoom. This setup ensures sharp focus for subjects at any distance, the vendor said. ZenFone 3 Zoom also has the first Asustek SuperPixel Camera that enables shooting in night-time or low-light environments. The smartphone is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 625 14nm processor, while the high-capacity battery also gives the ZenFone 3 Zoom the ability to double up as a power bank to charge other devices.

Samsung Electronics has begun mass production of Exynos 7 Quad 7570, the company's newest mobile application processor (AP) built on 14nm process technology for the budget smartphone market as well as other IoT devices. Last year, Samsung adopted advanced 14nm FinFET technology for its premium processors and has since expanded the adoption to other segments, bringing premium features to more affordable smart devices. Exynos 7570, with four Cortex-A53 cores in 14nm, delivers 70 improvements in CPU performance and 30% improvement in power efficiency when compared to its predecessor built on 28nm. The new Exynos also offers a fully connected mobile experience by integrating a Cat. 4 LTE 2CA modem and various connectivity solutions, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio and GNSS. Additionally, with design optimization and feature consolidation for components such as PMICs and RF functionalities, Exynos 7570 reduces the total chipset size by up to 20%, giving manufacturers better ability to craft slimmer smartphones, according to Samsung. It supports screen resolution up to WXGA, record and playback of videos in Full HD, and improved ISP (image signal processor) for 8Mp/13Mp front and back cameras.

Nvidia has announced that it plans to integrate a high-speed interconnect, called NVLink into its future GPUs, enabling GPUs and CPUs to share data five to 12 times faster than they can today. This will eliminate a longstanding bottleneck and help pave the way for a new generation of exascale supercomputers that are 50-100 times faster than today's most powerful systems, the vendor said. Nvidia will add NVLink technology into its Pascal GPU architecture - expected to be introduced in 2016 - following Nvidia's new Maxwell compute architecture for 2013. The new interconnect was co-developed with IBM, which is incorporating it in future versions of its Power CPUs. With NVLink technology tightly coupling IBM Power CPUs with Nvidia Tesla GPUs, the Power data center ecosystem will be able to fully leverage GPU acceleration for a diverse set of applications, such as high performance computing, data analytics and machine learning. Today's GPUs are connected to x86-based CPUs through the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, which limits the GPU's ability to access the CPU memory system and is four- to five-times slower than typical CPU memory systems. PCIe is an even greater bottleneck between the GPU and IBM Power CPUs, which have more bandwidth than x86 CPUs. As the NVLink interface will match the bandwidth of typical CPU memory systems, it will enable GPUs to access CPU memory at its full bandwidth.