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Qualcomm Ships Dual-Core Snapdragon Chipsets
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?"
...Already done. OSU student-developed Ultra-Mobile PC based on a 500MHz ARM Cortex-A8. Now playing Doom II on a campus near me. Not too bad, since when I went to OSU a dozen years ago I had to buy my own $2000 Pentium 75Mhz machine to do computer sci on...
As soon as HTC brings out a proper iPhone competitor
Nexus One? Droid Incredible? Evo?
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The Z80 was a major improvement over the 8080 that it was derived from. It became the most popular 8-bit CPU, and still sells millions every year in variants such as the eZ80 and Z8 microcontrollers.
The 8086 was an extension of the 8080, and thus inherited all of its limitations as well, and they held x86 back for a long time. As you say, a new design, the 68000, was far more pleasurable to use.
However where the 8080 succeeded was being the fourth major Intel CPU design (4004, 8008, 4040, 8080) which gave Intel a massive amount of developer feedback as to what the essential operations they needed to support in their CPU were.
As for "Reduced" in RISC, it actually stands for "Simplified", meaning orthogonal instructions, a reduced number of instruction formats, and so on.