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."

Comments

Okay then

[Jbcarpen]

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.

Re:Okay then

[ledow]

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.

Re:Okay then

[TheRaven64]

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).

LG is releasing a series of dual-core smartphones

[angry tapir]

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

Re:Enlighten me please

[amRadioHed]

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

Re:Killer feature.

[davester666]

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!

Re:Killer feature.

[sznupi]

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...

The most capable mobile processor

[stephanruby]

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).

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[teh31337one]

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)

Re:Enlighten me please

[jrumney]

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).

Re:Enlighten me please

[mjwx]

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.

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

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.

Re:Enlighten me please

[pspahn]

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.

Re:Apple?

[iamhassi]

"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

Misleading Headline?

[GaneshAnandTech]

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.

Re:Apple?

[darthdavid]

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.