http://gizmodo.com/5552176/qualcomm...ghz-chips++seen-in-a-smartphone-near-you-soon
Smartphone or somethingpad only?
Smartphone or somethingpad only?
Qualcomm's dual core up to 1,2GHz
- Thread starter fehu
- Start date
This is meant for smartphones AFAICT. They also have their QSD8672 chipset, which has a dual core running at 1.5 GHz which they're targeting at both smartphones and at smartbooks and tablets.http://gizmodo.com/5552176/qualcomm...ghz-chips++seen-in-a-smartphone-near-you-soon
Smartphone or somethingpad only?
Any word on the exact specification of this SoC? Like what the GPU specs are and what about power consumption?
The thread title states up to 1.2GHz; if they scale down frequency and considering that SoCs like OMAP4 will also carry dual core CPUs I don't see what's there so impossible for smart-phones.
There will really be very few situations where both cores will run at its maximum frequency and full load. In all likelihood, only one will ever be saturated while the other serves as a secondary processor to handle background routines.
In either case, this chip is made on 45 TPG, which cuts leakage by about 10x compared to 45G (typically what's used in mobile chips).
Yup, of course there's a catch: unless Qualcomm decided to invest in an extra buck converter (dc/dc power regulator) on the power management chip, which is far from free, both cores need to run at the same voltage so there's a bit of waste there.
Uhm, surely you must be confusing processes here? Mobile chips are usually on 45LP/40LP, and I've never heard of anything called 45 TPG. Probably you mean 40LPG, which is a triple gate oxide process? Compared to 40G, it would indeed lower leakage by a lot, but compared to 40LP the advantage is noticeably higher performance for a slightly higher leakage (actually it's slightly more complicated than that, you need to compare highest-Vt 40G transistors to lowest-Vt 40LP transistors to get a better idea of the trade-off).
40LPG would certainly explain how they increased clock frequency by about 20% from the MSM7x30! That would be very interesting. AFAIK, Tegra2 is still on 40LP, but both NVIDIA and Qualcomm are standardizing on 28LPT (SiON triple gate oxide) and later 28HPM (High-K triple gate oxide), not sure about TI.
I'd mention how if NV meets their schedule for Tegra3 (to sample in Q4) then this chip looks quite unimpressive, but given NVIDIA's amazing execution lately for Tegra *cough* (their execution for taping out stuff has been good, but sadly there's more to life than sending money TSMC's way) I think I should just shut up
I hear that in some cultures shipping GL ES drivers with your devkits is also highly regarded...but sadly there's more to life than sending money TSMC's way) I think I should just shut up
Haha, are you refering to the Linux boot image? AFAICT, WinCE/Android GL ES is supported properly at least. It's infinitely better than the early OMAP3 stuff anyway. Also presumably their non-Android Linux focus is on Chromium and WebOS, both of which nearly certainly work very differently from vanilla Linux in terms of exposing display acceleration. So I'm not exactly surprised they de-emphasised it.
I still believe the problem they had is they're focused on the premium market in markets where the rest of the ecosystem isn't mature enough to release anything premium. So all that happens is a bunch of design wins that get canned or delayed as people realize people are going to complain about XYZ limitations/problems (currently that's Flash becoming Froyo/2.2-only and Google only enabling the Android Market for tablets in Gingerbread/3.0 afaik). The same is true of Snapdragon outside of phones of course, which is why I'm mentioning that in this thread. They should have focused more on low-end 'impulse buy' products, but part of the problem I think is that 3G is too expensive for that and PC OEMs didn't want to encourage ASP erosion, so there were no viable distribution partners no matter how attractive the market.
Yes, but at least one core can scale back its frequency, which, leakage being very small in TGO, actually is the main factor in power consumption.
Triple Gate Oxide, yes, but the library is referred to as "TPG" last I looked.
Scorpion 1.5 will be on LP but the ones targetting ~1.2-1.3GHz are made on TGO 45.
I thought Tegra 2 was 40G?
Yep absolutely, of course there's still the catch that if you need 1.0v to run at 1GHz (aka Tegra2 according to devboard docs iirc) and need one core to run at full speed and another at just 200MHz which could work at, say, 0.7v then you're wasting a bit of power on that second core through that extra 0.3v... Of course, that's a small detail and I should really stop thinking about useless things like that
Ahhh, library. I'm sure you're right - I was using the public process name rather than the library name.
Intriguing thanks, makes a lot of sense
I never checked specifically fro Tegra 2, but I know for certain Tegra 1 was on 65LP - and that exact same Tegra2 chip targets flagship smartphones so 40G would be rather surprising I think. Also iirc they need 1.0v to hit 1.0GHz as I said above, whereas ARM's "Osprey" Cortex-A9 synthesis on 40G (probably better than NV's but not unbelievably so, it's not full custom or anything fancy) has two versions: one power-optimized that does 800MHz at 0.81v and one speed-optimized that does 2GHz at 0.9v - so NV only managing 1GHz at 1.0v on 40G would be disappointing. It's much more likely they're using 40LP Multi-Vt with more lower Vt (higher leakage/higher performance) transistors in the CPU core IMO.
Yep absolutely, of course there's still the catch that if you need 1.0v to run at 1GHz (aka Tegra2 according to devboard docs iirc) and need one core to run at full speed and another at just 200MHz which could work at, say, 0.7v then you're wasting a bit of power on that second core through that extra 0.3v... Of course, that's a small detail and I should really stop thinking about useless things like that
It will of course, but it isn't nearly as bad as scaling frequency.
From ARM's website, it looks like both the power optimized and performance optimized hard macros are on 40G. The power-optimized hard-macro targets 800MHz with a estimate power consumption of 0.5W which sounds about on par with Tegra 2.
nVidia hasn't been traditionally good at designing for frequency, I wouldn't see it being too far off to have 1GHz at 1.0V at 40G. Keep in mind this is for the MP core.
This is just all speculation of course, I mostly thought it was 40G from some off-the-cuff comment.
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Wishmaster
Newcomer
Arun it seems that they invested in additional dc/dc power regulator
Link they added support for DDR2 and DDR3 and with 1080p support it should easily match tegra2 and OMAP4 offering The same should apply to msm8x60(probably not DDR3 support) which AFAIK is first dual core chip sampled(should appear in devices in 4Q this year).
What do you think?
Link they added support for DDR2 and DDR3 and with 1080p support it should easily match tegra2 and OMAP4 offering
The same should apply to msm8x60(probably not DDR3 support) which AFAIK is first dual core chip sampled(should appear in devices in 4Q this year).What do you think?
The truly amazing thing with Qualcomm is that despite their overwhelming size, they're mind-blowingly agile. This is good news, as were all the other roadmap changes compared to what they announced in 2008 (the MSM7x30 changes seem to have been accomplished on particularly short notice). And their roadmap decisions since then are very smart and definitely impressive. I still think some of their technological subsystems aren't best-in-class, but with that kind of execution who cares?
It'd be even more impressed if something QSD8672-based did ship this year, but we shall see.
It'd be even more impressed if something QSD8672-based did ship this year, but we shall see.
There are many spots concerning the current Qualcolmm SoCs that can make me think that more than a few sw based optimizations could change quite a few things even today.
When I first read about the Dell Streak the first impression was definitely "wow". But after reading a couple of reviews like that one: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3853/the-dell-streak-review
the first excitement quickly got washed away.
IMHO whoever deals with SoCs has to realize how important software actually is. It won't do the consumer much good if he gets a great looking device but ends up with lacklustering performance and responsiveness. And no I don't think it's a pure hw problem in such cases.
Wishmaster
Newcomer
This problem should seize to exist with WP7 and after seeing their recent xbox live phone announcement I can't wait to see what kind of graphics can we expect from dual core msm8260(which seems to be based on z460), hopefully it will be used in all high end WP7 phones starting early next year.
But one thing is certain - 4Q'10 will be an interesting time of year
One question. Is it only me or does msm8255 is just qsd8250 with adreno 205 instead of 200 at 45nm and maybe some slight adjustments and performance improvements?
Wishmaster
Newcomer
It seeems that qualcomm has finally updated their webpage with specifications of msm7x30, msm8x55, msm8x60 and qsd8672.
QSD8672
MSM8x60
MSM8x55
MSM7x30
And it seems that there are already preliminary benchmark results from HTC desire HD on glbenchmark. According to them adreno 205 on msm8255 yields only to sgx540 on galaxy S.
Hopefully msm8x55 will replace qsd8x50 on all future devices. Higher graphics performance, probably better multimedia performance(hopefully as good as on samsung hummingbird) and improved power performance(hopefully not only due to 45nm).
QSD8672
MSM8x60
MSM8x55
MSM7x30
And it seems that there are already preliminary benchmark results from HTC desire HD on glbenchmark. According to them adreno 205 on msm8255 yields only to sgx540 on galaxy S.
Hopefully msm8x55 will replace qsd8x50 on all future devices. Higher graphics performance, probably better multimedia performance(hopefully as good as on samsung hummingbird) and improved power performance(hopefully not only due to 45nm).
The HTC Vision (also Adreno205) scores slightly better than the desire. Considering it's the same 800*480 resolution as the Galaxy S smart-phones, it's at 1424 frames vs. highest Galaxy S being now at 1918 frames. Albeit I'd expect for both sides performance to slightly scale due to sw optimisations, I wouldn't suggest that that gap might close. So judging from one public synthetic benchmark it's in reality somewhere in between a SGX535 and a 540, under the presupposition that the 535 isn't clocked higher than 250MHz.
