The increased interest in reducing the cost of development in mobile products was highlighted by two little noticed awards at the ARM TechCon this week in Santa Clara. Qualcomm won “best in show” for hardware for their involvement in the DragonBoard development kit from Intrinsyc, and newcomer Esencia Technologies for software with their new support for floating-point architecture support. Intrinsyc introduced the development kit earlier this year and is on a trade-show road trip hawking the $500 board to anyone who will listen. Unlike most of the development kits coming out recently (e.g. Raspberry Pi and Adapteva’s Parallellla), this one is specifically focused on products using android linux-based software and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor.

Esencia Technologies’ upgrade is a bit more broad in it application, opening up innovative uses of floating point arithmetic for wireless networking, voice and sound processing. EScalaPlus scalable Floating Point Architecture (FPA) opening effective FPA to new, growing applications. EScalaPlus supports up to 32 concurrent IEEE-754 floating point operations (FLOPs) per cycle. To keep area requirements low EScalaPlus offers the ability to optimize for operations strictly required by the application software and automatically removes unused hardware resources.

See an interview with Esencia’s Karl Kaiser here.