Qualcomm Ships Dual-Core Snapdragon Chipsets 168
rrossman2 writes "Qualcomm has issued a press release revealing it has started shipping new dual-core Snapdragon chipsets. These chipsets run each core at up to 1.2GHz, include a GPU that supports 2D/3D acceleration engines for Open GLES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1, 1080p video encode/decode, dedicated low-power audio engine, integrated low-power GPS, and support for 24-bit WXGA 1280x800 resolution displays. These chipsets come in two variants, the MSM8260 for HSPA+ and the MSM8660 for multi-mode HSPA+/CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev B. The press release also lists QSD8672 as a third-gen chipset like the two mentioned, but doesn't go into any detail of what its role is. With this announcement of shipping chipsets, how long until HTC makes a super smartphone?"
Re:Nahh... (Score:3, Interesting)
With this, should be able get a 10 hour 12 inch ultralight netbook, that can do 8 hours playing video or gaming. Also they can put a non-windows on it and say android, and sell it really cheap.
All this is directly good - further pressure in Intel and windows margins, and more people expecting instant 'on'. The question is, how soon before Windows 7 on ARM comes along?
ARM-based laptops (Score:4, Interesting)
Great Timing (Score:4, Interesting)
I said almost.
Power efficiency? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some power-draw information for H.264 decode, full tilt GPU utilisation, 25/50/100% CPU utilisation of one/both cores would be welcome.
Waiting for the tablet... (Score:2, Interesting)
What's so bad about x86? (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a lot of assembly programming in the 1980s, for nearly every major processor available at the time. The 8086 rocked, in comparison to the others, at least until the 68000 came out.
The one processor that really stunk, IMHO, was the z80, and that's why its lineage died after being so popular. But the others, like the 6809 and 6502, were rather limited in comparison to the 8086.
Of course, virtual memory is a different beast and adapting x86 was a kludge. But I don't see RISC as being any improvement. If anything, they should have gone to a *more* complex instruction set, otherwise you start losing efficiency at the lowest level with all the library function calls that are needed. One example of a superb implementation of CISC for virtual memory was the VAX instruction set. The VAX was easily the winner in ease of assembly programming.
In the end, I'd rather have a good CISC implementation than RISC. For an example of how RISC sucks, take the Microchip PIC architecture. They even claim "only 35 instructions to learn" in their marketing, as if this was an advantage.
In conclusion, here's the car analogy: RISC is like a muscle car, all power but cannot make curves.
if only microsoft had never existed (Score:1, Interesting)
if only microsoft hadnt parasitically drained and hindered development of the computer industry.
we might have operating systems that actually used the sophisticated features that chip designers were imagining and implementing. even the 386 provided features far more sophisticated than those used by the backwards compatibility driven windos nt, the unused rings of security, the io permission maps and virtualisation of memory. its a testament to microsoft's marketing department that many people believed that these features were somehow microsoft's innovation, and not the creation of intel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
imagine the alternate history that could have been!
Re:Give me an x86 phone...who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mobile usages are limited by available battery technology at least as much as processing power; and the former moves forward much slower. Process lead of Intel doesn't quite work the same as before in this case...
Sure, there's one future, unreleased, next year Intel product [arstechnica.com]; as you can see from the article, basically "smartphones only", no Win for you or generic Linux distro (not a big deal so far). But now it gets interesting..."southbridge" has "system controller/32 bit risc" - would be surprising if that's not some ARM (plus at least another one in radio interface; that's already probably more ARM cores than x86 ones, to keep power consumption at merely acceptable levels; Intel just couldn't do it without ARM). Less efficient and more expensive multichip solution (and of course other manufacturers are expected to make this effort, for miniscule portion of the market...while Intel doesn't risk anything; but anyway, there are no announcements - while phones would need to get certs quite some time before release; Android players have no incentive to switch; Apple has none, either, considering their inhouse ARM team; Samsung goes its own way, their own SoCs; Nokia devices with MeeGo are an uberniche product - they will certainly ride on Symbian for a long time)
Plus Intel doesn't even tell everything - they show those nice power usage numbers only in scenarios...when x86 core is idling; when the "supporting" hardware (with a great help of ARM cores :D ) does the real work. Power usage when x86 is doing something intensive (using its "impressive" speed) is strangely absent...
It will be still probably around an order of magnitude difference. Plus ARM won't stand still, look at the progress in the past decade from, say, ARM7TDMI to latest Cortex.
Again - a progress constrained by battery technology; Intel offering doesn't help that, quite the contrary - their greatest strength, process shrinking, no longer works quite the way as before.
BTW, how is the i960 or Itanium going?
Re:Give me an x86 phone...BAD MOVE (Score:3, Interesting)
Regarding Open Office on Android: Android Tablets are coming, Android phones take a BT keyboard, and some have video out...
Regarding Win7 and other regular OSes on mobiles: it may be impossible to get Win7 to be energy efficient, and keep the oodles of power-sucking services (and the basic architecture) of that server/desktop OS. Unlickily, those are probably required for compatibility.
Regarding x86 mobile: x86 was never designed as a low-power, high-efficiency CPU. Attempts to backport that are somewhat succesful, but I can't imagine x86 ever being as efficient as ARM cores that have been designed from the ground up to be precisely that. The one advantage Intel has is process technologies. See http://netbooked.net/blog/arm-vs-atom-size-vs-power-vs-performance/ [netbooked.net] for a biased source :-p
Other than that, I agree with you. Oh, wait ...
Re:Waiting for the tablet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Me too. Further, I would probably pay what Apple is charging. Your feature set is also my feature set, but I also demand GPS and a back-mounted camera of at least 3MP. Bluetooth and GPS are uneasy partners and I don't want a dongle dragging on the ground; a camera is mandatory for reality overlay.
Re:Great Timing (Score:1, Interesting)
HTC devices are notorious battery hogs, unfortunately. I speak from experience - HTC Developer's G1 and Nexus On
This quote means you're an absolutely idiot.
Basically the reason Android phones are widely believe they have poor battery life is because they can do soooo much more than is even possible with an iPhone. So you logic works out like this: Android has half the battery life because it did more than twice the work for me. Ergo, it has poor battery life. WTF?!?
When you make your phone constantly work, doing shit which is completely impossible with an iPhone, and suddenly you have "short" battery life, that doesn't mean it really the device has poor battery life. When Apple can come close to doing half of what is possible with an Android device, then come back and whine about the poor Apple battery life. Until such time, you sound like a complete idiot.
There are utilities, such as WiSyncPlus, which can drastically improve battery life for most devices. In doing so, it forces the device to function more iPhone-like during scheduled periods. As a result, it roughly doubles my battery life. The simple fact is, if you stop demanding your phone to constantly run, allowing it to sleep, battery life is absolutely fine. Very fine in fact.
I easily see two days out of my phone G1 with a stock battery + WiSyncPlus. I get four days to five days with an extended battery. That means when using your Android device much like an iPhone, yet still are getting far more capability, you actually see far superior battery life than what you see with an iPhone.
Bluntly, stop getting drastically more work out of your Android device and then condemning battery consumption on the fact you demanded your device to do far, far more than is even possible with an iPhone.