Low-cost emerging market SoC/phone discussion

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GPS on this phone is actually very good. Fast and accurate fixes. I understand that earlier Mediatek chips were pretty poor in this regard but it seems that the problem has been resolved in the more recent chips.
 
Here's what seems to be the first MTK6595 based smartphone from Zopo:

http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Zopo...4-3GB-RAM-32GB-ROM-14-0MP---Black-334714.html

~320 bucks sounds way more reasonable than the Meizu.

I'm still not totally sold on all these Chinese make phones..I have doubts on the long term build quality and the Android update situation. I am currently using a $100 Xiaomi Redmi 1S and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed by it. Yes I know that for the price I could not have got anything better..but just saying. Xiaomi is one of the manufacturers I have some hope for though. And for ~300 bucks, I'd rather take a Snapdragon 801 based Xiaomi Mi4 over these Mediatek phones anyday.
 
I'm still not totally sold on all these Chinese make phones..I have doubts on the long term build quality and the Android update situation. I am currently using a $100 Xiaomi Redmi 1S and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed by it. Yes I know that for the price I could not have got anything better..but just saying. Xiaomi is one of the manufacturers I have some hope for though. And for ~300 bucks, I'd rather take a Snapdragon 801 based Xiaomi Mi4 over these Mediatek phones anyday.

Let's be honest: does the long-term build quality matter all that much?
Most people change smartphone every 2 years, 3 years max.
 
@mariner
on Himax, the GPS is not good. It need around 1minute to lock-on and the acuracy hovering around 10m.

but maybe its because the phone only able to read GPS instead of GPS + Glonass + something (i forgot).
 
Long term may not matter to the first owner but often these devices are resold or shipped to third world countries.

Better ecologically if it lasts so it doesn't have to be scrapped after a couple of years.

And for the owners, better build quality and materials in something that you're picking up and constantly handling could be a better experience.

Even Samsung is making metal phones now.
 
@mariner
on Himax, the GPS is not good. It need around 1minute to lock-on and the acuracy hovering around 10m.

but maybe its because the phone only able to read GPS instead of GPS + Glonass + something (i forgot).

Strange. GPS has always been pretty quick when I've used it on my Coolpad. I've used FasterGPS to set the UK NTP server in the ROM and use AGPS.

Good enough for me, in any case, as I rarely use Satnav on my phone but on the couple of occasions I have, it has worked fine.

I remember reading that previous generations of Mediatek devices took several minutes to achieve a lock so there is certainly an improvement in some respects!
 
I'm still not totally sold on all these Chinese make phones..I have doubts on the long term build quality and the Android update situation. I am currently using a $100 Xiaomi Redmi 1S and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed by it. Yes I know that for the price I could not have got anything better..but just saying. Xiaomi is one of the manufacturers I have some hope for though. And for ~300 bucks, I'd rather take a Snapdragon 801 based Xiaomi Mi4 over these Mediatek phones anyday.

I don't even recall which SoC your Redmi contains but I think it's a MTK6589; things like wifi and/or GPS signal could be lacklustering depending how old the SoC version really is. After a certain point Mediatek fixed quite a few things and integrated the wifi/GPS stuff into the SoC.

The Zopo I have cost me early last year around 220 in US dollars and it's still working like a charm and it has one of the best 1080p LTPS displays I've seen in its class. Then again I usually read around the net user impressions for quite a few months before I target a specific device. Most of the chinese smartphones don't hurt as much in build quality as many would imagine but rather in crappy sw implementations.

It's over 2 months now that I'm monitoring user impressions for an Onda V989; it gets better with each and every new ROM update, but if it won't reach a certain point of maturity I ain't buying.
 
Long term may not matter to the first owner but often these devices are resold or shipped to third world countries.

Better ecologically if it lasts so it doesn't have to be scrapped after a couple of years.

And for the owners, better build quality and materials in something that you're picking up and constantly handling could be a better experience.

Even Samsung is making metal phones now.


We're not talking about the devices being scrapped. They're not made of wood, they're made of long-lasting and solid polymers.
What is usually claimed as "build quality" means little more than how much stress and strain it'll take before it starts creaking and bending through the screw joints and glued parts. And even then it'll hardly affect its usability.

As the owner of a HTC One (metal unibody), I question the advantage of it being made of aluminum. There are some advantages of using metal but there certainly are disadvantages too.


I don't even recall which SoC your Redmi contains but I think it's a MTK6589; things like wifi and/or GPS signal could be lacklustering depending how old the SoC version really is. After a certain point Mediatek fixed quite a few things and integrated the wifi/GPS stuff into the SoC.

The original Redmi 1 used the MT6589 but the new 1S version uses the 1.6GHz Snapdragon 400.
My wife has the 1S and the GPS works flawlessly. It takes just a few seconds to get a signal just like my HTC One with a Snapdragon 600.
 
@mariner
on Himax, the GPS is not good. It need around 1minute to lock-on and the acuracy hovering around 10m.

but maybe its because the phone only able to read GPS instead of GPS + Glonass + something (i forgot).

have you installed GPA assist and/or EPO?

http://chinesetech.net/2013/10/16/mtk-phone-gps-software-fix/

maybe this helps. Some phones with mediatek SoC come with this software preinstalled some without. And it makes a big difference as far as I can tell from the reviews of different phones.
 
I'm still not convince by the Big.Little approach, especially in an open environment like Android, even less by those Little.little ones.

I think that things are getting ridiculous, shitty benchmarks and unrealistic workloads have people driving the market in the wrong direction.

At this point is funny to see both Apple and Nvidia, which both have started some no longer reasonable trends (wrt resolution and core number) either stick "sane" resolution (+300PPI is hardly but anyway...) and sane number of cores (2).

Mediatek (and Huawei with its Kirin line, LG with Odin) is answering to something the market (wrongly) asks for (which is high Antutu scores <= insert non representative bench),though I find it weird for Qualcomm to follow their steps.

Too late, I got contaminated I threw away my core i3 set-up and ordered an Avoton based one...
 
Mediatek (and Huawei with its Kirin line, LG with Odin) is answering to something the market (wrongly) asks for (which is high Antutu scores <= insert non representative bench),though I find it weird for Qualcomm to follow their steps.

It's not so weird, Mediatek have market share in China due to having more cores. Clearly it's an appealing prospect to the customer base. If you find something that customers want, you make it, and make a lot of it. Qualcomm want that chinese market share, and hence have joined the bandwagon.

Apple aren't trying to sell socs so make the best one they can for themselves. Nvidia aren't in the low end/low cost chinese market, as they don't make ultra-cheap socs.
 
Has anyone seen the LG Odin integrated in a commercial device?

I'm still not convince by the Big.Little approach, especially in an open environment like Android, even less by those Little.little ones.

I think that things are getting ridiculous, shitty benchmarks and unrealistic workloads have people driving the market in the wrong direction.

While there's truth in the marketing perspective, big.LITTLE isn't a panacea but a eulogy for power consumption.

At this point is funny to see both Apple and Nvidia, which both have started some no longer reasonable trends (wrt resolution and core number) either stick "sane" resolution (+300PPI is hardly but anyway...) and sane number of cores (2).

NV's next Erista SoC will have most likely a 4*A57+4*A53 config in big.LITTLE, which I still personally prefer over their former 4+1 config.

Mediatek (and Huawei with its Kirin line, LG with Odin) is answering to something the market (wrongly) asks for (which is high Antutu scores <= insert non representative bench),though I find it weird for Qualcomm to follow their steps.

It's the consumers that made Antutu unfortunately a popular benchmark and it's Mediatek's and other's drive for octacore and what not SoCs and not something that the consumer wanted. As for QCOM they were probably just awefully late with their own 64bit CPU development and are using big.LITTLE as a stop gap until their own 64bit cores are ready for prime time. The 64bit craze is something that Apple started and ever since everyone is trying to get 64bit cores asap out the door even if sw isn't even ready for it :p
 
It's not so weird, Mediatek have market share in China due to having more cores. Clearly it's an appealing prospect to the customer base. If you find something that customers want, you make it, and make a lot of it. Qualcomm want that chinese market share, and hence have joined the bandwagon.
That is what I said, the market is asking for the wrong thing.
Now imo it is a "bad" (more short term) decision for Qualcomm to join the fray instead of try to really enlighten the quality of its SoC and (in-house) CPU. They had LTE solution (the best one) before everybody but it is over now how do they plan from differentiate especially in the eyes of customers that have been tough to evaluate hardware on the wrong basis?
Benchmarking on Android is full of it, games performances or performances under heavy application are never accessed properly, reviews are made by a bunch of bloggers that receive devices for free from manufacturers, etc.
It is bad but it is also good, Qualcomm has all the money it needs to "market" its products.
Apple aren't trying to sell socs so make the best one they can for themselves. Nvidia aren't in the low end/low cost chinese market, as they don't make ultra-cheap socs.
Are Chinese inherently stupid? Last time I check it seems to that actually it is more the contrary. Why do they care for the wrong metric? because some big companies do not spend their marketing money properly.

It is not about price or BOM, I would be surprised if that:
MT6592: x8 A7 + 1MB of L2 (so if wiki is right it is 512KB per 4 core cluster) + Mali 450 MP4 + 32bit memory interface
cost more than that
MTlio: x2 A9 + 1MB of L2 (shared) + Mali 450 MP3 + 64bit memory interface

Both produce on the same 28nm lp process, I know which one would perform the best in benches yet it would not be the one I would buy.

Actually there are unanswered question not with Big little or more generally the scaling in ARM solution once you go past one "cluster" (4_ cores). The AMD solution in the PS4 and XB1 is terrible for example, even if slightly better the situation in the ARM realm could be not that rosy=>
You have less L2 than it looks or at least accessible without the performance tanking.

Then there are issue with the software? Who is in charge, how the OS know where to pin which process, etc. => pain in the ass, unnecessary at this point.
Even if the OS were to do the work properly (magically) on its own, then how avoid performance trashing, say high performance process running on the high power cluster needs to access data that is on the L2 but on the other cluster? (possibly a hundred or more cycle away)?
So actually for the octa core ARM A7 with cluster running at different clock speed I'm not even sure that it doesn't end detrimental to real life performance (vs the really parallel friendly workloads in benches).


And so on, it is unnecessary complication at this point. OK the A15 was a bit too much for LP process, yet there are other options: middle of the road core as the A9 (or now A17). There are also other way to increase performances that benefit a wide class of workload => increase the L2 size.
Wider memory controller also comes to mind (especially as 64bit or x2 32 bit ain't crazy either).
 
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Are Chinese inherently stupid? Last time I check it seems to that actually it is more the contrary. Why do they care for the wrong metric? because some big companies do not spend their marketing money properly.

It is not about price or BOM, I would be surprised if that:
MT6592: x8 A7 + 1MB of L2 (so if wiki is right it is 512KB per 4 core cluster) + Mali 450 MP4 + 32bit memory interface
cost more than that
MTlio: x2 A9 + 1MB of L2 (shared) + Mali 450 MP3 + 64bit memory interface

Both produce on the same 28nm lp process, I know which one would perform the best in benches yet it would not be the one I would buy.

I'm not familiar with MTlio, but that was not mentioned in your previous post. You said it was "funny" that Apple and Nvidia didn't go the way of Mediatek. I gave you the reason, they are not competing in the same space as Mediatek.

In terms of the chinese market, mediatek and others have marketed "core" not being as good as "core+1". This is now ingrained in the market. marketing does work sometimes. Hence Qualcomm followed mediatek, as they DO want to compete in that space. Even though a few months earlier there was the famous remarks by the senior Qualcomm exec (is he still on gardening leave ?) that totally dismissed the approach of putting ever more CPU cores in the soc.
 
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Tangey I think there are no significant disagreement between us just missunderstanding ;)
I did not ask anything (wrt to Apple or Nvidia positioning) just find the situation wrt to their offering now funny/ironic.

Now the Chinese market is evolving fast and truth be told they are producing pretty awesome devices, as an European when I look at what is available in the low and mid range (I don't have the cash for high-end and my carrier is the best deal around but doesn't subsidize phones) in India or China (/ East Asia at large) I feel like I live in an under developed country /sinking country...
As a (huge) side note Chinese or INdian market are not less or more educated than other market, just as bigger market (for low and mid range device, the latter looking more and more like high end ones by the way) they have a bigger impact.

Looking at Mediatek or even Qualcomm roadmap I'm not sure it gets better.
If the market was "better" I think that people would ask for something like MT8135 (x2 A15 + x2 A7, powerVR 6) with LTE for their phone and have the saved silicon invested in cache, wider memory interface, faster RAM, etc.
 
Are Chinese inherently stupid? Last time I check it seems to that actually it is more the contrary. Why do they care for the wrong metric? because some big companies do not spend their marketing money properly.

It is not about price or BOM, I would be surprised if that:
MT6592: x8 A7 + 1MB of L2 (so if wiki is right it is 512KB per 4 core cluster) + Mali 450 MP4 + 32bit memory interface
cost more than that
MTlio: x2 A9 + 1MB of L2 (shared) + Mali 450 MP3 + 64bit memory interface

Both produce on the same 28nm lp process, I know which one would perform the best in benches yet it would not be the one I would buy.

It's the first time I even read about the MTlio and frankly without knowing frequencies, die area and power consumption/battery life of it in final devices it's as non telling as any sterile specification list where the most important stuff is missing.

For the hairsplitting the 6592 is manufactured under 28HPm@TSMC http://www.mediatek.com/en/products/mobile-communications/mobile-chipsets/smartphone/mt6592/

Actually there are unanswered question not with Big little or more generally the scaling in ARM solution once you go past one "cluster" (4_ cores). The AMD solution in the PS4 and XB1 is terrible for example, even if slightly better the situation in the ARM realm could be not that rosy=>
You have less L2 than it looks or at least accessible without the performance tanking.

It's true that the 6592 has a somewhat awkward implementation when it comes to its two quad clusters but hey they're all learning mind you. Samsung couldn't get big.LITTLE in hw also right from the first try.

I did not ask anything (wrt to Apple or Nvidia positioning) just find the situation wrt to their offering now funny/ironic.

Well you either have me on ignore or you missed my point that NV is actually having in Erista a 4+4 big.LITTLE 64bit ARM core config. Don't ask me why though...

Now the Chinese market is evolving fast and truth be told they are producing pretty awesome devices, as an European when I look at what is available in the low and mid range (I don't have the cash for high-end and my carrier is the best deal around but doesn't subsidize phones) in India or China (/ East Asia at large) I feel like I live in an under developed country /sinking country...
As a (huge) side note Chinese or INdian market are not less or more educated than other market, just as bigger market (for low and mid range device, the latter looking more and more like high end ones by the way) they have a bigger impact.

I like the Allwinner A80T a lot to be honest, but obviously not for the unrealistic Antutu scores it gets :LOL:

Looking at Mediatek or even Qualcomm roadmap I'm not sure it gets better.
If the market was "better" I think that people would ask for something like MT8135 (x2 A15 + x2 A7, powerVR 6) with LTE for their phone and have the saved silicon invested in cache, wider memory interface, faster RAM, etc.

I think the 8135 has been devoured almost entirely by Amazon and there Mediatek or any Mediatek wouldn't give a rat's ass who gets it as long as they can meet their sales goals.

The MT6595 is times better than the 8135.
 
Has anyone seen the LG Odin integrated in a commercial device?
There are rumors of a launch throughout that month:
http://www.gsmarena.com/lgs_odinpowered_phone_coming_this_month_joining_the_g3_family-news-9994.php

While there's truth in the marketing perspective, big.LITTLE isn't a panacea but a eulogy for power consumption.
I wonder the most powerful and/or commercial successful SOC do not rely on it.
It makes sense in a controlled environment or if you have silicon in spare. Right it is not the case especially with the resolution being push absurdly high, with cache amount still being pretty low, etc.

It creates issue wrt software, it could be fine in a controlled environment like iOS but on Android I think it create more issue than it solves.

NV's next Erista SoC will have most likely a 4*A57+4*A53 config in big.LITTLE, which I still personally prefer over their former 4+1 config.
I hope Nvidia stick to its in house core (so that if those cores are any good), I also hope they do not fall for the "mandatory four core" mantra that seems to plague embedded devices.
It's the consumers that made Antutu unfortunately a popular benchmark and it's Mediatek's and other's drive for octacore and what not SoCs and not something that the consumer wanted.
With its ranking system definitely the guys behind Antutu got something right.
Now what mediatek did made and make sense, the market has a whole took a wrong direction imho. But it is true wrt to resolution, we are way past dimishing returns and actually crazy resolution on mobile devices create a lot of problems both hardware (crazy requirement) and software (size of the content being delivered to the devices, etc.).

I mean I laugh when I read reviewers saying that 200ppi is causing them some issue, how not sharp it is... how about eating its own BS. Even at 200ppi a phone (or tablet for that matter) is still the most sharp screen one has access to, end of the argument.
As for QCOM they were probably just awefully late with their own 64bit CPU development and are using big.LITTLE as a stop gap until their own 64bit cores are ready for prime time. The 64bit craze is something that Apple started and ever since everyone is trying to get 64bit cores asap out the door even if sw isn't even ready for it :p
Well they might be indeed but it is not needed, I expect their krait 400 and more to still be top of the line even after lollipop release.
What I don't get is why they decided to engage in the race to the bottom with Mediatek and the like. They did when they embraced ARM Cortex A7 quad core configuration in place of their own in-house design. They gave a lot of credence to competition and the below 4 cores SOC might suck. Now they are in tougher spot to differentiate themselves as competition is catching up.

WRT to MTlio well it doesn't exist I thought it would be obvious that I was using my nickname, I should have gone with MTliolio would have been easier ;)
 
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