APPLE'S A5 CHIP BEING MADE IN TEXAS BY SAMSUNG

Apple and other consumer electronics companies typically look to the Far East for components, but a new report suggests that the production of Apple’s current mobile processors has now moved to the United States. Reuters on Friday reported that the chip powering Apple’s current iPhone, iPad and iPod touch models is now manufactured in a new 1.6 million square foot Samsung factory located in Austin, Texas. The report cites unnamed people familiar with Samsung’s operations. Samsung’s new Austin facility — which is the size of nine football fields — reportedly reached full production earlier this month, and it was built to manufacture non-memory chips. The South Korea-based company confirmed that its Texas plant was recently expanded to manufacture logic chips, though it would not comment specifically on Apple or its A5 processor. Reuters reported earlier this year that Samsung lost the contract to build Apple’s next-generation A6 processor, which will instead be manufactured by Taiwan-based chip maker TSMC.

APPLE'S MACBOOK PRO LINE GETS SILENT SPEC BUMP

Apple on Monday quietly updated its line of MacBook Pro notebook computers with faster processors and more storage. The late-2011 MacBook bump comes a bit later than expected, but it is somewhat in line with various reports. Apple’s low-end $1,199 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop now includes a 2.4GHz dual-core Core i5 processor with 500GB of storage, and $1,499 will now buy a 2.8GHz dual-core Core i7 with a 750GB hard drive.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro includes a 2.2GHz quad-core Core i7 and an AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics card for $1,799 or a 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7 and AMD Radeon HD 6770M GPU for $2,199.

On the top end of Apple’s laptop lineup, the base-level 17-inch MacBook pro now includes a 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7 processor and the AMD 6770M for $2,499, and a fully-loaded 17-inch model includes a 2.5GHz quad-core Core i7 CPU and a 512GB solid state drive for $3,849. Apple’s updated MacBook Pro notebooks begin shipping immediately.

SAMSUNG RENAMES MOBILE PROCESSORS EXYNOS

Via a press release, electronics manufacturer Samsung announced that it would be giving its application processors — the ones designed to work in smartphones and tablets — a new name: Exynos.

“Application processors for the mobile market are one of the flagship products in our semiconductor business,” said the company’s vice president of marketing, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to introduce the brand name of Exynos for Samsung’s application processor family. As consumers demand more from their mobile products, Samsung’s Exynos chips will be the power inside enabling the coolest HD multi-media features with even longer battery life.”

It looks like Sammy is trying to capitalize on some of the name-brand mindshare that has cropped up in the smartphone and tablet processor-markets (Hummingbird, A4, Snapdragon, Tegra 2, etc.). The new name will first be used on a dual-core processor with the codename Orion; henceforth to be known as the Exynos 4210. The 4210 is set to enter production next month.

NO PROCESSOR REQUIREMENTS FOR HONEYCOMB

Earlier this week, the Internet was aflutter with rumors that Google’s tablet-optimized, Android-build — Honeycomb (Android 3.0) — would require, at minimum, a dual-core processor. Google’s very own Dan Morrill has taken to Twitter to kindly dispel the aforementioned myth. “Random note: there’s no hard minimum processor requirement for Honeycomb,” reads the tweet. “Trust me, if there were I’d know.” So if you are thinking of getting one of the plethora of tablets debuted at CES this week running Froyo, go for it.

APPLE QUIETLY UPDATES MACBOOK PRO

One of the items that was not mentioned at yesterday's 'Back to the Mac' event was the Macbook Pro.  It turns out Apple has in fact upgraded the processor on both the 15 and 17-inch Macbooks.  The new processor upgrades the current Intel Core i7 processor from 2.66GHz to 2.8GHz on both models.  Price of course has increased as well.  You will need to add $200 to the 15-inch model and $400 to the 17-inch bringing total retail to $2,199 and $2,299 respectively. [BGR]

IBM CLAIMS WORLDS FASTEST PROCESSOR

IBM has claimed they have created the world's fastest processor at 5.2GHz.  The z196 processor is a quad-core manufactured using their 45 nanometer technology.  The processor has 1.4 billion transistors and is capable of more than 50 billion instructions a second, all without any water cooling or fancy tricks.

Fujitsu's Venus processor claims to handle 128 billion instructions per second, so IBM may not be holding the crown for very long. [Engadget]