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Dual-Core CPU Opens Door To 1080p On Smartphones
An anonymous reader writes "Following Qualcomm, Samsung is also close to launching a new smartphone processor with two cores. Based on ARM architecture, the new Orion processor promises five times the graphics performance of current chips and to enable 1080p video recording and playback. Next year, it seems, dual-core smart phones will be all the rage. Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today, may be under pressure to roll out a dual-core iPhone next year as well."
LG's new Optimus line will include smartphones running on Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core chips.
It seems they are talking about recording 1080p, not viewing 1080p. You don't have to view your recorded videos on the phone.
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Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today, may be under pressure to roll out a dual-core iPhone next year as well.
This is silly. Apple is using Samsung's processor, an OEM version of the Hummingbird (which is not exclusively sold to Apple by any means). So if anyone has "the most capable [mobile] processor in the market today" (and even that statement could be debated), it's Samsung (certainly not Apple).
The feature is important for 1080p output, combined with HDMI makes a phone compatible with most projectors, LCD/LED TV's and modern monitors. I can easily see myself walking in and displaying a video or presentation stored on my phone. Ideal for impromptu sales pitches or just bringing a movie over to a friends place.
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Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.
Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.
In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.
Unfortunately, the dual core CPU has got almost nothing to do with the 1080p encode or decode. These are handled by dedicated IPs (pre-designed blocks which are slotted into the chip) from companies like Imagination Technologies and Chips & Media. They would work as well with an single core Cortex-A8 as they do with the Cortex-A9.
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Smartphones have been multicore for at least ten years. The early ones had two separate CPU cores, one for the application stack and one for the phone stack. One of the design requirements for the Symbian EXA2 kernel was that it should have a hard realtime nanokernel that could run both as completely independent software stacks on the same CPU core, cutting costs.
Even when they then only had one ARM core, the SoCs were heterogeneous multicore chips. Something like TI's OMAP3530, found in a lot of devices, has a CPU core, a GPU core, a DSP core, and a couple of other specialised cores.
That's why the headline here is quite misleading. Doing 1080p H.264 decoding on a pair of 1GHz Cortex A9 cores might be possible, but it seems very unlikely. Chips from the last generation, however, could all do 720p H.264 decoding on the DSP and / or GPU cores. This is not a chip that has enough processing power in the ARM cores to decode 1080p video, it is a chip that has two ARM cores and also, independently, has enough processing power to decode 1080p H.264 streams.
This part of TFA made me laugh:
Apple’s A4 processor, which is based on an ARM Cortex-A8 design, has been generally described as the most capable chip combination in the smartphone landscape today
I don't know who these people are, but I suspect that they are ignorant Apple fanboys. The thing that makes the A4 interesting is that it removes a lot of stuff that most ARM SoCs ship with, because Apple didn't need them. Photos of the die indicate that the A8 core (the same core that everyone else has been using for a year or two) is a stock part, unlike, for example, the Snapdragon which is very heavily tweaked (new floating point pipelines and so on).
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