Amd z430

if i recall correctly, amd sold that division some time ago and is a relatively old single unified pipeline design presented in 2008

 

Yes, they sold it: Qualcomm Acquires Handheld Graphics and Multimedia Assets from AMD.

 

From what I can gather from the AMD Q2 2009 conference call AMD retained the right to the Z4XX GPU in order to support and supply any customers that are using it in their designs, but there's no further development on the series.

 

I don't recall Xenos being as weak nor being limited to 4bpp per colour channel either.

http://distinctivegame.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/dd-tech-talk-1-nexus-versus-iphone-3gs/

 

The truth is that we don't know which snapdragon chipset will be used in those devices.

If they use qsd8250 then yes they will use z430 GPU, but if they decide to use newer msm8260(snapdragon2) then it's not z430 but variation of z460 with 4x the performance.
We don't know the numbers for the new msm7x30 - whether it is z430 with higher clock for GPU or lower clocked z460 cause it seems that the graphics performance is higher than qsd8250.
There are many things we still don't know so its better to wait and see which chipset will be used in most devices.

One good thing is that we already know that h264 at high profile will be supported by the OS(the same goes for VC-1 at advanced profile) so it means that the hardware has support for it, but that would mean that it is not qsd8250 which supposedly doesn't support high profile(neither VC-1) but msm7x30 supports it(confirmation comes from qualcomm itself) so maybe msm7x30 is the chipset for WP7...

 

The article states z430 for the record and I severely doubt that from a 430 to a 460 there's truly a 4x times performance difference.

My point still stands any of that stuff is nowhere near to deserve being called "mini-Xenos" or anything close to it.

 

I already discussed this with Arun some time ago and he confirmed that snapdragon2 is probably using some kind of z460 variation, besides linley confirmed that snapdragon2 has 4x GPU performance.
It has nothing in common with Xenos used in xbox but probably AMD called it like that for marketing purposes.
I still think that something newer than qsd8250 will be used cause it doesn't support VC-1 codec and yet according to specs at msdn wp7 supports VC-1 hardware acceleration. Just because they talk about z430 it doesn't mean they're right. They probably don't know anything about different versions of snapdragon(like most people).

 

First of all, I don't know what WP7 will use. It's possible that to accelerate time-to-market, the very first phones will use Snapdragon1, and it's possible that they skip straight to MSM7x30 (which, after all, should be very realistic in that timeframe if WP7 was practically optimized around it - it's not as if there were integration issues then!) - and I think I said that before, but I really like the MSM7230/7630. It's a very nice sweetspot product, with great CPU performance and more than "good enough" in all other respects.

The original QSC7230 design was based on an ARM11, a OpenGL ES 1.x core, and VGA video. That left a big gap in their roadmap and it wasn't a very impressive part, whereas the MSM7230 clearly is - and as they pointed out themselves to Linley, they gained nothing from doing a System-in-Package if it prevented them from using Package-on-Package for the memory. So this is a very good roadmap change, and I must admit I didn't think they were so agile - which is impressive for a company that big. Mind you I still think something with an Icera baseband and a discrete app processor would be preferable, but what else would you expect from me!

I don't know if it uses Z430 or Z460. The problem is that even if it uses the latter, it's a scalable core and so could refer to a 1 TMU, 2 TMU, or 4 TMU+ version. The one in Snapdragon2 is either 2 TMU or 4 TMU (@266 or 133MHz respectively, I'd bet on the latter). And don't worry Ailuros, it's not a question of believing if it's possible - it's not as if this was just an efficiency improvement. It simply scales with die size. What this really tells us is that Qualcomm is now willing to dedicate more silicon to 3D (as a percentage of the chip) than they were in the last few generations. But yes, that's still laughably far from the real Xenos (533MPixel/s vs 8000MPixel/s!)

I don't want to nitpick, but I thought the MSM7230 wasn't part of the Snapdragon family! It uses the same Scorpion CPU core, but it's a 'MSM' - not a QSD. Although given the similarity in specs and sampling time, I do wonder whether the QSD8650A might be the same chip in a larger package to be backwards compatible... Not that I should waste my time investigating such useless details, mind you.

 

Considering that msm8xxx series is considered part of snapdragon family I don't know why msm7x30 wouldn't be

 

I couldn't find any reference to the MSM8xxx as Snapdragon family members, and this is what the MSM7x30 PR says:

That leaves a bit of leeway on whether it is also part of the Snapdragon family, but not much.
Also, I realize this is perhaps the least interesting debate that could possibly be imagined by a human brain, so I think we better stop here... *poof*

 

From what little I know about ATI Yamato, it does seem like a potent little SM 3 design, including its similarities with Xenos. I hope to be able to get my mittens on one of those very soon (which would conclude my handheld GPU menagerie here ; )

 

Must be the reason that based on die area rumors I was led to believe that Tegra2 is a 4 PS/2VS/4TMU part. In the end likeliest scenario is that it contains the same amount of units as in T1 with just twice the frequency.

When I fall once flat on my nose, don't be surprised if I take any funky marketing claims with a salt mine

 

It originally wasn't but they've expanded the Snapdragon name to more than just QSD chips now. It will include basically anything with a Scorpion in it.

 

It is all a bit useless when you take into account that there's nearly 0 game/app on the Android Market that pushes the GPU in any meaningfull way and also that the current drivers used by HTC (provided by Qualcomm?) seem to have been coded by bozos. Chek out the comparison Benchmark vs the HTC HD2 which has the exact same specs (but running WinMO): http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2010/05/17/htc-desire-review/ . Some of the results don't make any sense IMO. Can't wait to see how it's is going to turn out with Windows Phone 7 because Microsoft will be directly providing the drivers to the OEMs this time.

 

I believe Microsoft won't be the one that's providing the drivers, that part still has to be done by the OEM. I do hope that Microsoft will make sure that Qualcomm puts some serious effort into their drivers. BTW, we're still not 100% sure what exact version of Snapdragon Microsoft will be using for their first generation of Windows Phone 7 phones (still a stupid name).

 

Maybe I/we should start a new thread specifically dedicated to Windows Phone 7. But for lack of a better place to post at the moment, I'll just post it here. The main thing I'm wondering about is what chipset the initial Windows Phone 7 phones will use. We know it's something from Qualcomm's Snapdragon lineup, but I'm wondering what specific version (as mentioned in my previous post)

I just read this interesting article over at cnet.com: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20007973-56.html?tag=mncol;title
It's mainly about the people behind the development of Windows Phone 7 and is pretty interesting. One thing I noticed though is the caption next to this image: http://news.cnet.com/2300-13860_3-10003799-4.html?tag=mncol;txt
The caption read: "Microsoft Vice President Terry Myerson gets a look at a prototype Windows Phone circuit board that Qualcomm built with an all-new chip that had just started rolling off the manufacturing line."
Could that mean that the initial phones will actually use a SoC that has not yet been seen in any other phone thus far?

 

The HTC Mondrian is supposedly packing the the latest Qualcomm QSD8650A/B chipset (45nm Snapdragon clocked at 1.3 Ghz) Maybe this is it?

 

If so then it will be adreno 205 instead of 200, wonder if its only 200 with higher clock or maybe adreno 200 with improvements plus higher clock... according to qualcomm it is something more than just higher clocked adreno 200