Low-cost emerging market SoC/phone discussion

Unless I'm reading incorrectly, the leak shows that MediaTek's new multicore CPUs are A7 based, not A9.

 

The slide for MT6588 on gizmochina indeed says Cortex-A7.

 

Heard ZTE or Huawei saw a big drop in sales, profits.

Low cost Android may not be taking over yet.

 

Mediatek says 1.X GHz and ARM says >1 GHz at 28nm

 

Heard where? According to IDC, at least ZTE grew their smartphone sales 300% YOY in Q2 2012.



Edit: Huawei is increasing their shipments too, according to iSuppli. However, they seem to be growing at a (significantly) slower rate than previously forecast.

 

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.c...ed/24593?elq=b12671aac0b14b8c93fc60ead445975f

 

That article doesn't mention anything about a drop in actual units sold, revenue, market share, etc. All it says is that profit has dropped, largely due to lower investment income earned compared to prior reporting period. Also note that ZTE does not have extravagent dollar amount of profit in the first place, so a big swing in investment income for the period could materially affect profitability.

 

Not sure how practical it is, but mediatek are said to be launching the worlds first 8-core arm based smartphone/tablet chip in Q1 2013.

http://www.itproportal.com/2012/09/28/mediatek-to-launch-8-core-mt6599-soc-with-lte-in-q1-2013/

Although the following article quotes a more realistic q4 2013
http://techideki.com/mediatek-mt6599-8-core-with-lte-slated-q4-next-year/#more-1054

Also sen some news indicating that the quad core chip will clock the A7s @ 1.2ghz, and Lenovo will be first to market with a phone.

 

itportal maybe made a mistake or didn't research properly. the mtk6588 is coming out in q1 2013...not mtk6599.

gizbeat.com (http://gizbeat.com/781/breaking-mtk...at-mtk-mt6588-mtk6588-will-be-coming-q4-2012/) shows it coming out sometime in 2013.

i wouldn't be surprised to see it q3 of 2013.

the dual cored mtk6577 just started having phones in middle of this year, and already the 4 core mt6588 will come out end of this year or very beginning of 2013.

 

I didn't see anyone mentioning about upcoming XBurst JZ4780.
It's the successor of JZ4770.
It's a MIPS32 dual core clocked at 1.5GHz with 64bit DDR3-1066 and sgx540 manufactured on 40 nm.
Some preliminary bench-es here.

Supposedly very cheap and low on power.

 

Pretty sure its targetting tablets as opposed to Smartphones, but none the less, the Allwinner A31 Soc seems to be highly impressive.

quad core A7, and wait for it, EIGHT core SGX544. Depending on clock speed, this might well out-perform the ipad4 graphically.
I wonder if the spec is correct ? the 3Gpixel/s fill rate suggests around 185Mhz clock.

It also supports 4K video out.

http://www.jsxltech.com/blogs/allwi...ner-a31-tablet-pc-designed-and-made-by-ployer

http://www.jsxltech.com/blogs/allwi...-first-allwinner-a31-quad-core-tablet-by-icoo

 

Hmmm from those links:

More like iPad3 performance? For iPad4 GPU performance there are quite a few GFLOPs missing if the frequency is truly around 185MHz.

Quite a surprise!

 

Good job detecting that slide!

It's not 375MHz then either, since fillrate is most likely quoted with depth complexity (probably a factor of 2.5x encounted).

SGX544MP2, 2 TMUs/core = 4 TMUs * 300MHz * 2.5x overdraw = 3000.

***edit: not that the marketing from Allwinner doesn't stink regarding the GPU, but if they'd really quote ALU lanes NV style, they would had quoted 32 cores [2*(4*Vec4)] ALUs.

 

yeah, well worked out both of you. First time I've seen PowerVr stated in terms of the number of ALUs.

Still 544MP2@300MHZ is pretty decent, probably not a match for the 543MP4@250 of the ipad3, but none the less, quite competitive amd with a better compliance set.

Allwinner (?) seem to have done a decent job in Soc design time. IMG licensed to Allwinner sometime between May '11 and April '12
(was mentioned in the full year results to April 2012 as a new licencee), so looks like they went from licence to end silicon in 18 months max.

Also, Is this the first tablet boasting 4K video out ? , wonder are they implementing some PowerVR video decode ?

 

http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedet...ro25&D=Alps+mt8389_tablet_s3&testgroup=system

This one smells like the Mediatek SoC with a quad A7@1.2GHz + SGX544MP1@320MHz.

And Qualcomm announces mainstream SoCs with quad A7@1.2GHz just in time:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6498/...y-msm8x26-and-wtr2605-quad-core-arm-cortex-a7

For the Allwinner stuff above I'd love to know how good sw integration is and the according MSRPs.