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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?"
I'll wait until it makes a super ULTRA smart phone.
Om
Since the whole "smartbook revolution" seems to be a puff of hot air, the thing to hope for would be that some sort of "assembly kit" possibilities for computer-building hobbyists interested in RISC/ARM architecture could be available. This seems to be a market entirely owned by x86, with tons of pieces that can be stuck together like lego. I for one would love to have a full-size passively cooled laptop with low-energy processor and screen.
Give me a phone where I can run an x86 operating system and x86 software. Give it a USB port, HDMI (or similar) output, and a fast SSD drive. Then I can take it to work, plug it in, and use it. Then, at the end of the day, I can drop it in my pocket, take it home, plug it in, and use it. A consistent computing environment would be great. Right now, I use three machines on a regular basis. This is being typed through Remote Access.
Oh, and I want a phone where I can play Wasteland! IJKL, baby. Gimme some blood sausage.
Great timing to reveal this just ahead of Steve Jobs iPhone 4/HD A4-processor equipped phone. I almost feel badly for Mr. Jobs getting beaten up like this. Even Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) is getting an HTC Incredible.
I said almost.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It can encode/decode 1080P, so why didn't they put a 1080P Display controller on it? Your new HD mobile device will still be limited to WXGA 1280x800....So much for an HD iPad competitor.
One core for flash, one core for you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Some power-draw information for H.264 decode, full tilt GPU utilisation, 25/50/100% CPU utilisation of one/both cores would be welcome.
That would be a very bad move since any x86 OS is both bloated, and not suited for a touch screen only interface. They all want keyboard/mouse inputs. Even Apple realized that OS/X was not the thing to run on a smartphone, while HP has dropped Windows 7 for their Slate, Google offers Android, not Chrome, for phones, and Microsoft Win 7 Mobile is really looking iffy to appear at all.
This is also why Microsoft Office and Open Office aren't available on the Android phone yet. They are not suited for this type of hardware, memory limitations, screen limitation, and lack of keyboard/mouse.
And most SSD drives these days are just about the size of your entire phone. Try to realize why a smartphone is a different paradigm altogether.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Those of us old British farts who remember the BBC Micro will be celebrating. Who would have thought that, nearly thirty years on, its descendants would at last become a threat to (at least the low end of) the Intel/Microsoft domination of personal computing?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Good thing I don't have mod points today. I wouldn't know whether to mod you funny, insightful, or troll.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
We will not get the great dream phones we all want until the current patent mess is sorted out. As soon as HTC brings out a proper iPhone competitor, Apple will sue the crap out of them, making sure that at least they drag the new product into a mire of fud and drawn out proceedings.
Net result? The customer doesn't get a better device.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Well Adobe is back into your handheld devices.
Flash likes it cpu time on some operating systems so we will have to see what the real world tests show.
More cores vs battery needs vs flash
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Microsoft Win 7 Mobile is really looking iffy to appear at all.
Uh, what?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Sounds good for a phone, but awesome on a tablet, where there is more room for battery. The iPad got the right form factor and weight, but I also need a SD slot, HDMI output, user freedom and uncrippled USB. That's one tablet I would buy.
What's the point of a chipset capable of 1080p playback if it cannot drive a 1080p screen? Fair enough you won't have a 1920x1080 resolution screen in your phone or tablet device (not yet) but I for one wouldn't mind being able to connect my new 1080p capable device to a TV or monitor to playback 1080p at proper resolution.
All the limitations you mention are in the software that's currently available for x86, not in the architecture itself. Mobile OSes and apps could be ported to x86 without much hassle (in fact the kernels already are). The x86 of today is perfectly suited for a cell phone (whether we need that or not is another matter... anyway, the more competition the better).
But until very recently Intel simply hadn't made efforts to adopt it to the power and size requirements for a smartphone. And ARM has market momentum, which x86 doesn't.
Open Office on Android would be just impractical due to input methods and screen size, but there's no issue with architecture or memory. It would definitely make sense on a bigger screen, such as the iPad's. In fact, the Open Office team stated the show-stopper for Open Office on iPad is its extremely closed OS and app store, nothing about hardware. So the idea of Open Office on an Android tablet (when somebody makes it) isn't that far-fetched.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/12/44304/arm-outlines-power-benefit-of-multicore-processors.htm
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
You can improve ARM code density using the Thumb extension, but it's the variable instruction cycle length that kills x86. Pipelining, branch prediction, etc, is much easier with RISC.
The ARM architecture is far superior to the x86 which is why one of the most competitive markets, mobile phones, has moved there. ARM has consolidated there as they do not have the marketing or R&D budget to take on Intel head to head. The margins have been much higher with desktop CPUs, with marketing and playing the GHz game driving sales more than processor efficiency.
Once ARM processors take over the netbook market, there will then be an incentive to increase their maximum raw performance. The server market would be the next target. However, they are unlikely to challenge the desktop market any time soon. Intel is cash-rich enough to dump processors onto the market at as loss if necessary to drive them out. Shame, as my ARM-based desktop machine was incredibly fast.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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!
Been waiting for a Tegra 2 Android phone for a long time. But finally an alternative come. :)
I love competition, I don't care who makes the cpu of my super smartphone, as long as I get it soon.
It will be interesting to see how Nvidia will counter this, like make sure that we actually can buy a phone with the Tegra 2 would be a good start...
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; 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?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Uhm.. as much as i really dislike Apple, I feel obligated to point out that the iphone/pad run stripped down versions of OSX. Apple just removed a bunch of the crap that doesn't need to be there.
99% of time we use our computers on the internet, and most sites nowadays contain some sort of Flash video. Well, no mobile plays them all out of the box, as we speak. It's not the hardware that is the problem, it's the software.
There are lots of things that make Flash video necessary on mobile devices. For example, there are lots of video presentations about newest technologies. It's a shame that I have to sit in front of a PC for one hour to watch these, when the same thing could have been done on the way to work, saving valuable time.
People have tried x86 processors, the Intel Atom and found they just aren't suited to a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone. The battery life just wasn't good enough.
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/ for a biased source :-p
Other than that, I agree with you. Oh, wait ...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Bleh, so I will have to wait for Beagleboard 2.0 with OMAP4.
DO WANT!
n900 does flash out of the box just fine with it's default browser.
I read somewhere that it's actually more efficient in a typical usage scenario to have 2 cores, one of which you can shut down, both that you can throttle, than to have just 1. In terms of power draw and heat dissipation.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
from the spec it seems to me this chipset could be great for netbook or tablet, probably better than for smartphone
What are you thinking about Quallcomm!
(And no, there aren't any emails with the feel of Eudora, just a cheap reskin of some lesser mail program)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Before they take over the netbook market, they have to, you know, actually release a netbook. They've been talking about it for 2 years now and they still haven't released anything.
Mada mada dane.
The ARM has been very successful in what have been, in effect, embedded applications. Even the iPhone and the iPad are, basically, embedded. Android and Maemo are general purpose platforms with optimisation for communications, but Android and Maemo devices are too limited to be general purpose (much as I nowadays wonder how I managed without my N900, it is not a computer replacement.) These new dual-core SOC designs mean that ARM will be back driving true general purpose computers. The original BBC Micro (though of course not ARM-powered) was a general purpose machine with, for its day, a very high level of on-board system integration. Hence my comment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They are not suited for this type of hardware, memory limitations, screen limitation, and lack of keyboard/mouse.
Ummm, he was asking for a phone without those hardware limitations (i.e. USB, HDMI, SSD drive). It would probably need some rather impressive energy modes in order to switch from desktop to battery modes, but thats all in the software.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
Can you link some evidence of this? I've looked around and haven't found anything other than Apple (I think it was Steve Jobs, but can't remember clearly enough to say for sure) claiming it's OS X.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Someone should put a package together for tiny and quiet PC/set-top/file server setup.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Well, it does have at least very close underlying OS, similar libs used for usermode apps, etc. Does not make it full OSX of course; is not that different from what Android or, especially, MeeGo do.
One that hath name thou can not otter
You surely need to work hard with software to make sure it exploits the possibilites of power savings given by hardware...but it's not the same as "thats all in the software"
One that hath name thou can not otter
Even Apple realized that OS/X was not the thing to run on a smartphone
Actually, Apple is using OS X on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, and soon, the Apple TV. They changed the name of the OS from OS X to iPhone OS, but it's the same thing. Apple is attempting to differentiate the OS that runs on their desktops, servers, and laptops by calling it "Mac OS X," but it is, in fact, the same underlying BSD operating system, basically, FreeBSD userland and a Mach kernel. Mac OS X uses Quartz with the Aqua theme for it's GUI window management, which is absent from iPhone OS. The equivalent in iPhone OS is Springboard.
The Admin and the Engineer
iPhone OS
The Admin and the Engineer
Yeah. The sprint's HTC Evo is sexy, but it sucks the battery down like nobody's business. You're going to want to carry the charger cable with the phone. What we need is one of those plutonium power cells like the one they put in Voyager. Then your battery would last 20+ years! Disposal would be a bitch, though...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In the netbook/smartbook marketplace, what I think people want is not just a new gadget for serfing the web. They want something with the same capabilities as their old PC, only smaller. I think this is the reason why ARM netbooks never really took off. Their specs were crippled and they could run only custom software. Something that I am hoping for, is that I could get a ARM-based touchpad or netbook and use that to replace my noisy old intel desktop PC for web-browsing and simple programming. The CPU horsepower is more than enough, plus it would be fan-less and have three times the battery time. If it only had the capabilities: a decent amount of memory, proper graphics with hardware-accelerated video and HDMI out to a proper screen, USB ports for a keyboard, bluray and storage. I am eagerly awaiting an ARM-based touchpad to appear with these capabilities, so that I can start hacking.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Can I go into Verizon and by the N900? Or even test it out? What about AT&T? Sprint? T-Mobile? ... if you can, that's news to me. And that's why we forget it exists.
Apple TV currently runs a modified version of Tiger.
Good thing I don't have mod points today. I wouldn't know whether to mod you funny, insightful, or troll.
Troll is for things you don't believe but say anyway to get attention. The mod you were thinking of was 'flamebait'. Modding the above as troll is abuse of moderation, and further, abuses the spirit of slashdot moderation (focus on up-mods.)
Are you a regular abuser of moderation?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No need for RTGs. More generally, what you describe is a function of people getting wooed by "sexy" and forgetting about also looking at battery life when making their choice.
Well, TBH I can almost see this new Intel "smartphone Atom" to be reasonably popular in such environment...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Even Apple realized that OS/X was not the thing to run on a smartphone [...]
Apple run a stripped down version of OS X on the iPhone and iPad.
There's no reason to think Microsoft couldn't do the same with Windows, either, if they were sufficiently motivated.
Yes and no. It really depends on how the dual-core is architected. Assuming you had 2 cores with independent frequency and voltage scaling and assuming you were running two tasks that were fairly processor and memory intensive, it could indeed be beneficial to run them on 2 cores. Context switching is a killer on cache and memory and having a single CPU throttle between multiple processes is inefficient compared to two separate CPU's working out of their own caches.
Moreover, power is a function of voltage squared; so two CPU's running at 0.8V at 400MHz would require less power than one CPU running at 1.0V at 800MHz.
That would be a very bad move since any x86 OS is both bloated, and not suited for a touch screen only interface.
This is pure BS. Look at the upcoming Moorestown and the OSes available to run on them. MeeGo runs on it - completely touch-based OS. And, Android also runs on it. There is nothing inherent in the x86 to make it touch-averse. Where it has been lacking so far was performance for the limited power envelop. Moorestown will fix that. The next thing where it will still be lacking is not tight enough integration of communications capability - which is key to create a mobile platform that runs well with limited power consumption. Osho
I put on my robe and wizard hat...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wouldn't it be handled by the GPU using OpenVG?
I wouldn't know whether to mod you funny, insightful, or troll.
Aw hell, I'm a fan of all three!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I take it you've never heard of the Nokia N900? Runs Linux (Maemo), comes out of the box with full Flash 9 capability (in a Gecko-based browser) and Flash 10 will be available soon. Even on the older N800 (which, unlike the 900, isn't actually a phone) I could load Pandora or watch YouTube videos using Flash - in fact, either AdBlock or FlashBlock are near-essential for browsing on those devices, due to all the Flash. Fortunately, they (and at least one other Firefox extension) are available, as is full Firefox (and therefore all its extensions).
I've also heard that Flash is available on WinMo phones, but never tried it.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
My first Smart Phone was a Kyocera 6035. I've used them for longer than most people. I know all about the so-called "paradigm" you're talking about. It's crap. Give me a 800x480 screen for mobile use; and a real OS, video out, USB, and BT for desktop use. Then I'll have all the mobile devices in one, which is the proper "paradigm".
Apple switched the OS because they want to lock in the software market. If the iPhone was a real computer, Apple couldn't do that. They also want to get away from x86 so they can pay less for processors. I'd rather pay more to get a massive choice of software, freedom, and far greater utility.
And as for x86 being bloated, the interpreters take a smaller and smaller portion of the die. Meanwhile, instruction extensions have increased performance dramatically, and production technology has far more dto do with overall performance. x86 bloat has been a non-issue on the desktop for many years, hence the death of all its competitors. The G5 was crap compared to a Core Duo. So where does that leave the mobile space? We've reached the point where x86 can work fine in a phone, and in a couple more generations, there won't be any important difference in power usage between an x86 and ARM processor. 1/2 watt versus 1? Do we really care if the phone gets 48 hours or 72 hours of battery life? No, we usually don't.
You're thinking of a processor which is a single-chip solution combining a ARM applications SoC(apps proc) and a specialized DSP(comms proc) that communicates with the radio transceiver. These are not considered dual core as the apps processor treats the comms processor as a special hardware peripheral. The DSP cannot see SoC interrupts or the apps cache as it is only intended to implement the radio algorithms.
These specs tickle some of my nerdy genes. Any phone-maker that use these chips definitively attracts my attention. At least with a decent SW support to make good use of the hardware. Without it; a phone with these chips would be just a slightly faster [UI-wise] phone.. - Has competent software become a more valuable commodity than it used to be a few years ago?
Adobe's programmers like both.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
From one of the 2009 WWDC session slides: iPhone OS 3.0 and Mac OS X core share over 80% of their source code.
Nice, thanks. Dunno why I didn't think to look there.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
I want a fuel-cell! One that I can have as carry on and use in a plane!
Now if only they'd release it for their desktop version :^)
Never has been, never will be... ARM is popular because they're very low power, while x86 is not. ATOM is doing better in that respect, and ignoring the power requirements, vastly outperforming all ARM chips available.
ARM has been fooling people for many years now with the same old MHz myth Intel used to use. That nice 1.2GHz ARM core is only getting perhaps 1.2MIPS/MHz if you're lucky, while even an ancient pentium3 does 2.8MIPS/MHz. Modern x86 chips with various incarnations of SSE absolutely wipe the floor with ARM, with astronomical MIPS/MHz ratings.
And it's not like that's something they might work on... ARM has been around 1MIPS/MHz for a very, very long time. The 1.2MIPS/MHz is actually their new and improved performance.
People have a hard time differentiating between hardware and software. When their computer crashes, they don't know whether some program is badly written, or if the memory is flaky. The same is true of performance. I'd be willing to bet an obscene amount of money that this "incredibly fast" "ARM-based desktop machine" was running a highly tuned OS. Install some common OS like Linux on an ARM system, and an x86 system, and prepare to be in awe at the performance of old x86 CPUs most of us throw in the trash, because ARM just can't match it. PowerPC is the only architecture commonly found in embedded devices that can come close to competing with x86 in performance, which is why it's still the undisputed king in high-performance embedded devices, though ARM is certainly trying desperately to integrate enough DSPs and extra cores to compete with PowerPC in that space.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
N900 is a GSM phone, so no go for CDMA-based carriers (VZW, Sprint/Nextel). It'll run fine on AT&T and T-Mobile's network, but it will only do 3G on the latter.
Sigs are for losers
The 2D/3D acceleration fiasco died off with the 7200 series of Qualcomm chips. I had an HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt) that had no acceleration, and then an HTC Raphael (Fuze/Touch Pro) that had iffy 3D acceleration and poor video decoding performance, so the driver issue bit me firsthand.
:)
Luckily, the Snapdragon line (QSD8xxx) have all had working graphics drivers for the platforms it's been released with (WM 6.5 and Android, AFAIK).
My current Nexus One has full OpenGL ES 2.0 capability and hardware MPEG4 and h264 decoding. I'm a happy camper.
Sigs are for losers
Doesn't Cortex-A8 have already for some time quite a bit greater MIPS than what you write, "not like that's something they might work on" - up to 2MIPS/MHz? Cortex-A9, "that nice 1.2GHz ARM core" seems to be comfortably two times more than you said, per core of course. And ARM also has SIMD extensions...
What "fooling people"? How many people even realise how large number of ARM cores surrounds them all the time? (nvm their speed) If Intel has such advantage, why they haven't released very low clocked (it wouldn't be a problem with people working on embedded stuff) part that is still significantly faster and taking the market from ARM?
Why new Intel Atom "for smartphones" has probably at least two ARM cores to even approach sensible levels of efficiency? Why the talk about ARM servers?
One that hath name thou can not otter
you are right of course, "thats all in the software" is a joke that fails because you can't read my body language and haven't heard me say it before :)
Morpheus, God of Dreams.