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Dual-Core CPU Opens Door To 1080p On Smartphones

Posted by timothy on from the you'll-need-retina-display-mk2 dept.

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."

55 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Dual core iPhone by Jadware · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...so you can drop calls twice as fast.

    1. Re:Dual core iPhone by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 2

      As an iPhone owner I'd like to make it perfectly clear that we don't need dual cores to drop calls twice as fast. We're doing OK in that department already, TYVM.

  2. Okay then by Jbcarpen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My parallel programming professor likes to harp on the fact that nearly all new computers in the future will be multicore. Apparently he's right.

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    1. Re:Okay then by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The GP2X is a dual 200Mhz processor handheld console that runs off 2 AA batteries and was released in 2005. It was not that revolutionary, it was not that expensive, it was not that difficult to program. You can program on both chips so long as you don't mind temporarily ditching the in-built MPEG-decoding firmware that runs on one of them (it's replaced on each bootup) or being very careful where you tread. The Nintendo DS was multiprocessor. And not in the unconventional sense of "one CPU and a handful of support chips", two real, full, general purpose, programmable chips. Most modern games consoles have more than one real chip, many of them using multiple specialised processors (e.g. IBM's Cell in the PS3 which is a "9-chip" component).

      Massive parallelism has been around forever and it's in consumer electronics already and has been for quite a while. It might not be *designed* like that but you have always had home computers with multiple processors that can be programmed to operate in parallel. There were people misusing floppy drive controller chips and sound processors to do all sorts, and the GPU is "another" processor now, and one that's extremely good at running lots of things in parallel. Do you think that your CPU could ever keep up with software-rendering on a modern game? Or that a single-core "general purpose" GPU could?

      Your professor is right, except for his timescales - parallelism is already here, right down to tiny embedded systems, and has been for years. Just that hardly anybody uses it without some seriously specialised programming design beforehand. That tells you quite a lot about how expensive it is to use effectively. Hell, to a new programmer, even threading and re-entrancy can be a huge nightmare for them and our solution at the moment is blocking locks and things like that (so that we can *think* about them being seperate linear instances). If you can become an expert in parallelism you'll probably have a good career ahead - but a specialist one. Everyone else is just waiting until they can pass everything off to a dedicated chip and get told when it's finished - they don't *WANT* to properly program parallel programs (tongue twister!), they just want everything to happen serially and faster, or the closest approximation to that that they can get.

      Seriously, when you program any graphics library, you just throw a huge amount of 3D object data into another processor and let it get on with it. You don't care if it runs at 6GHz, or whether it's got a separate internal processor for every pixel of the final image running at 1MHz, so long as it damn-well draws the screen as quickly as possible and tells you when it's done. Parallelism is a hidden facet of modern architecture precisely because it's so necessary and so damn complicated to do it right. Programmers, on the whole, are much happier with linear processes. It's taken games this long to pass off physics, AI, etc. to a separate thread, and we've had threading for DECADES.

      Parallel things are just a placeholder at the moment because we can't up the GHz much and if we could, it wouldn't help that much with the tasks we want to do. So even operating systems are handing off everything they can to other chips - Ethernet TCP offloading, GPU, sound-processors, RAID, you name it. It's all about making the general-purpose CPU's do as little as possible so the main use of the computer can continue uninterrupted. And parallelism is only used to increase the things we can do, not break tasks into much more efficient subtasks. Most people who have dual-core or above in the early days wanted it so that other things (e.g. antivirus) got out of the way of the real process (e.g. games!) so it could have as much time running in it's single thread as possible.

      Parallelism can see fantastic gains but it needs to be done from the design stage each time. Mainstream multi-core products are too much of a moving target to do anything more fancy than run a number of huge, single-threaded programs at the same time. That's *not* the same thing, and never will be. Parallelism is specialised. Games programmers would give their right arm for everyone to have a single 100GHz processor instead.

    2. Re:Okay then by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Enlighten me please by scsirob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.
    Most if not all have less pixels than 1920x1080, so how would this produce a better picture than 720p?

    --
    To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
    1. Re:Enlighten me please by amRadioHed · · Score: 5, Informative

      It seems they are talking about recording 1080p, not viewing 1080p. You don't have to view your recorded videos on the phone.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    2. Re:Enlighten me please by dsanarco · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1080p on a smart phone screen is overkill, but it can output over hdmi to a screen capable of displaying 1080p

    3. Re:Enlighten me please by jrumney · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A crap cellphone lens is still just as crappy at 1080p as at 720p, in fact the higher resolution is more likely to enhance the flaws than at a lower resolution. 1080p on a cellphone is nothing more than a sales gimmick, just as 20Mpx on a compact camera is (or 5Mpx on a cellphone camera).

    4. Re:Enlighten me please by mjwx · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.

      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.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    5. Re:Enlighten me please by pspahn · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.

      You raise an interesting question, that which will likely be the next big paradigm in smart phones. Circular screens.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    6. Re:Enlighten me please by SoupIsGoodFood_42 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How does lossless digital zoom compensate for lens quality? As for noise reduction, wouldn't a lower resolution sensor of the same physical size be better than an algorithm?

    7. Re:Enlighten me please by mr_exit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Except that they're shrinking the die size enough that these new dual core, 1.5Ghz + chips will use less power then the current Snapdragon ones.

      --

      -------
      Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
    8. Re:Enlighten me please by peppepz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How does lossless digital zoom compensate for lens quality?

      I just meant it as an example of the fact that current phones' camera sensors do offer more pixels than is needed for 720p recording, so they use it for nice extra things such as digital zoom. So why couldn't the sensors of the near future use them for 1080p recording instead?

      As for noise reduction, wouldn't a lower resolution sensor of the same physical size be better than an algorithm?

      A lower resolution sensor, with the same S/N ratio, would capture less detail. Just dismissing higher resolution sensors as a marketing gimmick ignores the technical advancements in image sensors.

      I suppose that higher resolution sensors are needed for still photography, where exposition times can be longer, the camera can be supposed to be still, and the captured image can be downloaded with no hurry from the sensor, so the noise is lower.
      Movie filming just reuses the same sensor for a different purpose, where indeed a lower resolution sensor would be more adequate and cheaper, but then it would make the phone shoot worse photos. </speculation>

    9. Re:Enlighten me please by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think GP is talking about the fact that you only get the higher resolution with optics of matching quality. All optics have some inherent blurring, only the degree depends on quality (and with very high quality optics, you may run the diffraction limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited)

      So if you combine a high-resolution sensor with a second rate lens, all you achieve is that the blur where a sharp edge should be is spread across more pixels.
      To some degree this is OK because it makes the image appear less blocky, and a later interpolation to get smooth edges becomes unneccessary. But I think at some point the higher resolution of the sensor is just wasted.

      --
      C - the footgun of programming languages
    10. Re:Enlighten me please by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As an owner of 1080p recording equipment, let me say that any phone that records 1080p will be a giant turd.

      when you record at 1080p your lens quality becomes very important. even at 720p you can get away with the crappy NTSC lenses, but 1080p will show off bad glass right away.

      1080p in a phone is a ragingly stupid thing. It's stupid in all the consumer camcorders t hat are under $1800.00 right now as well. (Nasty purple fringing and plain old awful lenses on these things coupled with really low recording bit-rates.

      It's a marketing gimmick unless they have made HUGE advances in lens technology from just a week ago.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  4. LG is releasing a series of dual-core smartphones by angry+tapir · · Score: 4, Informative

    LG's new Optimus line will include smartphones running on Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core chips.

  5. Not dual core. More RAM! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Now I can watch amazing 1080p on a 4.5" screen. My cinema experience is now complete.

    Smart phones don't need dual core. They need more RAM.

    App designers are guaranteed certain resources when the application runs on a phone. This is why a single-tasking paradigm was popular, because it simply guaranteed these resources. Multitasking requires sharing of memory. Without swap space enabled, memory may run out quickly. Android has mechanisms for saving a program's state and killing off the least-recently-used application. Recalling the application reloads the saved state information within a fresh process. The iPhone just added multitasking, but not all apps can work with it.

    1. Re:Not dual core. More RAM! by bemymonkey · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yep, I have ~400MB available on my Desire (576MB in there total according to the spec sheets), and it's still not enough.

      My old Milestone (256MB RAM) was constantly killing off applications in the background because it was running out of RAM, sometimes not even saving the app states properly, causing me to lose my place (doesn't sound too bad, but it gets annoying quickly)... my Desire fares better, but there's still the occasional low memory kill when I have a lot of browser tabs open.

      What I want is a gigabyte or two of RAM and swap on SLC NAND... *drools*

  6. Killer feature. by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And by killer, I mean battery killer.

    I think smartphones need to go back to basics. I'd take a smartphone that lasted 4 days of normal use on a single charge anytime over a new one that does shit I don't really need anyway 10% (or even 30%) faster.

    Once they've got battery life back under control, get back on performance.

    1. Re:Killer feature. by davester666 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Fine. So you're a member of the 1% of all cellphone users that doesn't regularly connect their phone to their TV to watch HD movies.

      Maybe you should try joining the rest of us in the 21st century, with chargers at home, at the office and in our cars!

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    2. Re:Killer feature. by sznupi · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not necessarily; some tests by ARM/Symbian/Nokia strongly suggest that a n-core chip of x frequency is a good way to get considerable energy savings over a singlecore chip of n*x frequency. Of course whether or not it would be used that way is another thing...

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    3. Re:Killer feature. by bemymonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Killer feature. by pspahn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Certainly a woosh.

      OTOH, when I bought my Evo, I read plenty about the poor battery performance. Not a big deal, I thought, as I didn't buy it because I make a lot of calls, and figured that I would have some buffer to work with because so.

      Unfortunately, what I didn't necessarily predict, is that I would be using wifi tethering as much as I do. This eats up battery pretty quickly. I bring my netbook to all sorts of places so that I am not tied down with school, and can work on and turn in assignments even when on a fishing trip in Wyoming.

      The consequence is that I now bring my USB cable damn near everywhere I go. It is pretty compact and fits in a thigh pocket without issue, but it does give me a sense of still being wired even though I'm not supposed to be. My brother, who also got an Evo after seeing mine (he's an early 20's iThing convert), opted for the macho aftermarket battery for $60 and I have to say, I think I'd like the same. What I'd really like to get, however, is a decent solar charging backup battery I can clip on my backpack so that I always have some extra juice when I need it. And after searching around for the right answer, I've concluded that everything is either a cheapo solution that won't last, or is still quite overpriced.

      Ultimately, I always have my portable jump-start/air compressor/radio/roadside hazard light battery thingy that has a USB port to rely on.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    5. Re:Killer feature. by fnj · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Wow, I want these new cellphone chips in notebooks and network attached devices! They are far ahead of the watt sucking crap from Intel and AMD.

    6. Re:Killer feature. by syousef · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      So what you're saying is that if you never actually look at your phone, or use it as a phone, you can run idle applications in the background. Colour me impressed.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    7. Re:Killer feature. by bemymonkey · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, I'm saying that given the same other hardware, this processor won't affect battery life negatively in a very noticable way.

      Battery life is already crap, and it's not because of the processors used. All this power optimization should be taking place where it's needed most... crappy AMOLED screens with twice the power draw of LCD when displaying anything remotely useful (i.e. not a mostly black screen), for instance.

    8. Re:Killer feature. by bytta · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Actually - this raises another question:
      Why the hell aren't companies making headless Linux servers using these processors?

      A 1GHz processor drawing max 40 mAh means that such a device at full load uses less than one Watt a day! (for the CPU)

      That's a couple of orders of magnitude over the current wall-wart Linux devices available today...

  7. The most capable mobile processor by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:The most capable mobile processor by teh31337one · · Score: 4, Informative

      A4 has a PowerVR SGX535 GPU, which can push 28 million triangles/sec whilst the Galaxy S has a PowerVR SGX540 GPU that pushes 90 million triangles/sec.

      http://bit.ly/bM3JeK note: the article lists iPhone 3gs at 7 million triangles/sec with 28m deleted, but IIRC it's actually the other way around. (7m rumoured, but it was actually 28m)

    2. Re:The most capable mobile processor by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      heheheh.

      distortion field - the gpu isn't apples, neither are any part on the soc they call A4. it's just a marketing diversion. a more truthful way would be to say that it's apples codename for the chip they're currently buying. much like g4 was a marketing term attached to some cpu's apple bought from elsewhere earlier, it didn't make them apple designed cpu's.

      there's other "but"'s that could be attached to it, but none of them really change the fact that anyone with cash could order chips pretty much exactly like apples batch of a4's, straight from sammy.

      fabbing is the hard part anyways.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  8. Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11 by Slur · · Score: 3, Informative

    iPhone 4, iPod Touch gen.4, iPad, and Apple TV gen.2 all use the Apple A4 processor, which is an ARM+GPU manufactured by Samsung.

    --
    -- thinkyhead software and media
  9. Yes but the tech press loves Apple by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you haven't noticed, everything Apple does is always "brilliant" and "innovative" according to the tech press. Doesn't matter if they are releasing something that is the same as everything else. For example the Apple TV gets praise lavished on it as an amazing on-demand streaming device, even though nearly every Blu-ray player with an ethernet port also does streaming and, of course, plays DVDs and Blu-rays on top of that.

    For that matter, it might even be Apple PR copied verbatim. It is amazing how many press agencies will just reprint PR copy that the like. A PR firm will send out the "OMG t3h new stuffs!" memo, as PR firms do, and sites will pick it up and regurgitate a good bit of it verbatim.

  10. Re:Apple? by flanktwo · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's the benefit of processing using imaginary cores?

  11. Re:Apple? by Nursie · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who needs multiple cores when multi-tasking has been decreed irrelevant?

    Or did I miss an update where multitasking was invented and gifted to the world by Apple?

  12. Re:hm by peppepz · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can play the content over HDMI. All new high-end phones have a HDMI output.

  13. Re:Apple? by iamhassi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Since when have iPhone been about following the trend?"

    True, seems like they've been setting the pace. Touchscreen phones were pretty much non-existent outside of the Palm and a few Windows Mobile 6 phones until the iPhone came out, and even those phones were highly dependent on a stylus, iPhone was the first touchscreen without a stylus. Ever since the original iPhone everyone's been playing catch-up, and while others offer faster cpus and more megapixels, no one offers the 200,000+ apps or the huge fan based and the chance to be a millionaire app developer. In fact some of the largest Android game developers have boycott the Android Market. Do I care if the camera is 3mp or 5mp? No. Do I care if the phone offers the apps I want? Of course, these aren't just phones anymore, they're pocket PCs

    --
    my karma will be here long after I'm gone
  14. Misleading Headline? by GaneshAnandTech · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Reviewer / Analyst, AnandTech Inc.
  15. Re:Apple? by darthdavid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on, who's apps can only come from one place (if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL. On android they're free to set up their own market, distribute without a marketplace app or use one of the other marketplaces that already exists). And I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone.

  16. Re:Apple? by trickyD1ck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on, who's apps can only come from one place

    Yes.

  17. David Lynch by xororand · · Score: 2, Interesting

    David Lynch talks about watching film on a cell phone.

  18. There's some speculation it's a Mali GPU by Qubit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After Samsung "announced that it is adopting the Mali [GPU]...for its future graphics-enabled ...SoC ICs", it sounds plausible that the speedup and the lack of information about the GPU could relate to this Mali technology from ARM.

    ARM has recently released source for some parts of the Linux drivers for current Mali GPUs under GPLv2, which might be the first step towards ARM SoC's with fully-open GPU drivers.

    There are no guarantees, but at the moment it appears that ARM is much more receptive to the idea of open GPU drivers than Imagination Tech (PowerVR GPUs) or NVidea.

    I think it's a shame that AMD isn't moving faster w.r.t the embedded/mobile market. Sure, they're planning to make SoC's with a GPU on the same silicon, but as of last week they're not currently interested in competing with ARM for market share. And AMD's the chipmaker that's most actively supporting and creating open drivers for their graphics hardware.

    It'll be interesting to see where the hardware goes in the next couple of years. Can Intel (and AMD, if they get serious) pull marketshare from ARM, or will the RISC chip reign supreme?

    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
  19. Re:The original Nintendo DS has a 2 core CPU by janisozaur · · Score: 2, Informative

    Doesn't it have two separate cores? One 67.028 MHz ARM946E-S and one 33.514 MHz ARM7TDMI

  20. Re:It's also about maths by peppepz · · Score: 2, Interesting
    See for yourself, I've not found much Qualcomm information but Texas Instruments publishes a lot of documentation about their smartphone platforms.

    From a quick read of the user quide I see that their OMAP3 platform apparently has two modules for the camera interface; a "Camera ISP" module which fetches data from the CCD in raw, yuv, rgb or jpeg format, and a "IVA" module, which appears to be a DSP with hardcoded functionality for mainstream codecs but can also be programmed for what they call "emerging" codecs. This module can then DMA its output to the application CPU module. All the cores are on the same SOC and are interconnected with two Sonics buses, one of which must bear the bandwidth of the data coming from the sensor.

    What's impressive is that there is much less hardcoded logic involved than one might think. The OMAP4 leaflet claims its IVA core can deliver 30fps 1080p encoding and decoding for h.264 hp, mpeg4 asp, vc-1 ap, mpeg2 mp and on2 vp7.

  21. Re:Apple? by dropadrop · · Score: 2, Informative

    My guess is that the guy who wrote that pcworld article has not actually programmed for the iPhone. The article makes a big deal of the programmer having to do something about adding multitasking to their applications, but from what I've gathered from a few colleagues who have made some iPhone apps (some very popular) it actually requires an extremely small amount of work. By Wikipedias definition of multitasking the iPhone does multi-task, though I've noticed a lot of people trying to redefine the term lately. :D

    I'm not a big fan of the way the iPhone multitasks, but then again I previously only missed multitasking for things like Skype or IRC which are next to useless without the ability to run them in the background, and GPS apps which would shut down when a phone call came. I can say that multitasking on the iPhone is much smoother then it used to be on my previous Nokia phone, because that would just keep silently killing the background apps due to lack of memory (for example opening email and a big web site in the browser would suffice for this effect).

  22. Re:Misplaced Priorities by hitmark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    HDMI or displayport out? you will likely find more and more products with this port: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDMI

    Consider, where before, only apple could show having a singular port, now all may have so. End result, you can dock any device to any tv without worrying about carrying the right cable. Should make parties more interesting, i suspect.

    --
    comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
  23. Re:Apple? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2, Funny

    I have this vision of a chair throwing Steve Jobs. He's on stage yelling 'Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing....'

  24. 1080p on a flashlight by maroberts · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1080p on a tiny cellphone screen? Tell me when they have that on a flashlight. Imagine all the detail you won't be able to see in the tiny beam!

    ..would be quite good as you could shine it on a wall, vastly enlarged.

    Wait a minute, I've thought of a name for that.... a projector!

    --

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  25. Re:hm by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The N900 comes with 32GB of Flash built in, so it's enough for an episode of a TV show at 1080p by your metrics. I think you're talking nonsense though. BluRay disks store 25GB per side. If your assessment were accurate then this would be enough for 2 hours on a dual-layer disk, one hour on a single-layer disk. Given that most BluRay movies come on single-layer disks and don't take up the entire layer, and that TV stations use less bandwidth than BluRay, I wonder where you are getting this '1080p that is not compressed to oblivion' from, because it's certainly not any existing source.

    For reference, the maximum AV bitrate of BluRay is 48Mb/s, giving 21GB/hour. For HD-DVD, it was 36Mb/s, giving 16.2GB/hour. In practice, most films are encoded at a lower quality, often as low as 10GB/hour. By the time that these make it into phones, they are likely to have at least 64GB of flash in the higher end.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  26. Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11 by iJed · · Score: 2, Informative

    The last iPhone to have an ARM 11 was the 3G. They have been Cortex A8 based since the 3GS.

  27. Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11 by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nope. ARM11 is ARM's two-generations-ago, implementing the ARMv6 instruction set (confused yet?). The iPhone, like pretty much every other high-end smartphone, uses the Cortex A8 core, which replaced the ARM11 at the top end. ARM11 is used for cheaper devices - Samsung sells a lot of them, because they are much cheaper than the A8. The iPhone uses Apple's A4 chip, manufactured by Samsung, which uses an unmodified Cortex A8 core and a small number of other components. The only thing that makes the A4 interesting is that it omits a lot of hardware that most A8 SoCs include (stuff that Apple didn't need). This made it cheaper to manufacture, and may have slightly reduced power consumption, but it definitely doesn't make it the most capable processor. Quite the reverse, in fact.

    --
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  28. Re:Apple? by Karlt1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on,

    http://www.androidguys.com/2010/08/08/google-removes-easy-root-android-market/

    who's apps can only come from one place

    http://www.androidguys.com/2010/06/29/att-explains-opt-android-market/

    (if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL. On android they're free to set up their own market, distribute without a marketplace app or use one of the other marketplaces that already exists). And I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone.

    http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars
    http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-total-2-of-app-stores-1b/

  29. Re:That would work if... by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Funny

    But if we believe the parallel universes theory, aren't we all programming in parallel already?

  30. Re:Apple? by Nursie · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've heard that the iPhone does the kill behaviour too.

    Not to come across as too Fanboi-ish, but the N900 does it marvellously. Next step - Nokia, please make a slimmer,prettier Maemo/Meego phone? Please?

  31. Apple already preparing for this by yabos · · Score: 2, Informative

    The iOS SDK has Grand Central Dispatch, which is Apple's easy way of dispatching and managing multiple threads. If you program your application with these APIs, as soon as a dual core iPhone comes out your application will take advantage of the 2nd core.