Some people call Japan strange. I personally don’t buy that. Their customs are different than what everyone is used to, but that doesn’t necessarily make them a peculiar people. The Kyocera Honey Bee however, which has been out on the Japanese market since Q3 2011, is quite honestly the most offensive looking device on the face of the planet. Vomit inducing appearances aside, it does have quite an amazing trick up it’s sleeve. Inside the Honey Bee is a Renesas APE5R. Never heard of Renesas? They’re a tiny system on chip vendor who makes platforms that never leave the island nation of Japan. Like most SoC vendors, they take processors from ARM and other firms and then slap them on a piece of silicon. The APE5R has two ARM Cortex A9 processors clocked at 1.2 GHz, and more impressively a pair of PowerVR SGX543 GPUs. That’s the same GPU inside the Apple A5. The second generation iPad’s A5 is clocked at 1 GHz, the iPhone 4S has an A5 clocked at 800 MHz, so that makes the APE5R at 1.2 GHz the fastest SoC on the market. Now yes, Samsung has a 1.4 GHz Exynos in the Galaxy Note, but that particular chip uses an ARM Mali-400 GPU, which is fast, but not PowerVR SGX543 fast.
Why are we highlighting this smartphone if it’ll never end up on American, European, or even Asian shelves? For one thing, who knew Kyocera had the guts to make such a powerful device? Another reason, maybe giving Renesas some press coverage can make them an acquisition target? All we know is that 2012 will be an amazing year due to all the new chipsets hitting the market. Samsung’s going to have a brand spanking new Exynos in the Galaxy S III, Qualcomm’s S4 is going to power a significant number of Android smartphones in America, and NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 will put a smile on marketing people’s faces because they’ll be screaming from the tops of mountains about how you need to have four cores to enjoy the mobile revolution.
