Samsung Orion SoC - dual-core A9 + "5 times the 3D graphics performance"

I didnt get you there, what costs are you referring to and how do you think they've kept costs down?

The fab business is profitable no doubt, but surely selling more of your own phones is much more profitable? I would have thought they would try to sell as much of their own hardware as possible, while continuing to make money from fabbing chips for apple.

True, the SGX 540's performance is still impressive and it trades blows with Tegra 2. Note that the GPU in the OMAP 4 is clocked higher than Hummingbird. Also according to Rys, those performance numbers are with the old driver. Performance improves 20-30% with the new driver

 

Rumors have it that Apple has quadrupled wafer orders at Samsung; if true it would mean nearly half of Samsung's manufacturing capacity. Orion is on damn short supply and that's probably the reason why Samsung ordered a healthy amount of Tegra2 SoCs to equip both the Galaxy 10.1 tab and the GalaxyS2 Superphone in parallel with the Orion based GalaxyS2 smart-phone.

A hypothetical SGX543MP2 for Samsung would have meant quite a bit more performance compared to Mali400MP4, but on the other hand that performance wouldn't had come for free either. More die area for the GPU block for sure.

S5PC11x = SGX540@200MHz, OMAP4430 = SGX540@307MHz, OMAP4440 (+25% graphics performance) = SGX540@384MHz

 

Yea those rumours are possibly true. With the increase in die size of A5 and expected higher sales those numbers are quite plausible. Now this is just my opinion but im sure Samsung would have prioritized Orion production over Apple as that would help them sell more of their own products. But the fact that they have ordered a lot of Tegra 2's also goes against my theory. Apart from the supply issue, maybe Orion was just not ready early enough for them to use it in the Galaxy Tab 10.1. After all the rumoured date for availability for the Galaxy S2 is end March/early April.

I dont have much knowledge about mobile GPU's so i have no idea about the die size differences. How much would that difference be? Only a few mm2 right?

 

I recall reading a newsblurb that Samsung has supposedly ordered 1.5Mio T2s, but I have no idea if that's true or not. If it should be true however T2 sounds like a gap filler until Orion can be produced in reasonable quantities.

ARM claims for a single core Mali400 4.7mm2 under 65nm. http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-hardware/mali-400-mp.php A Mali400MP4 should be less than that amount times 4x since its scaling only fragment cores. With 4 fragment cores (MP4) it still has only one VS unit.

IMG has claimed that a single core SGX543 is at 8mm2 under 65nm. MP2 would be at 16mm2.

 

Isn't it weird that ARM made such a grave misjudgement by limiting so much the vertex shading performance in their top-end solution for 2010-2011?

 

I've seen dumber design decisions than that. Does Larabee work as an example?

 

Keep in mind that the VS unit is slightly overspecced; not only in relative performance terms, but also as a single PS unit cannot use/read as much data as the VS unit can output per cycle. Also remember that PS demands are increasing much more rapidly than VS in handhelds because screen resolutions are increasing (and that's before we even consider tablets!)

So I'm really not convinced that's a big deal. The Mali-400 MP1's performance is very competitive for its die size, so overspeccing on the VS there doesn't seem like it hurt them too badly. The Mali-400 MP4 benchmarks on Orion/Exynos are disappointing and imply subpar multicore scaling but I doubt that has much to do with being VS-limited. We'll see if it can be fixed or at least improved in drivers - if not, that might be yet another reason why Samsung isn't pushing Exynos as hard as some people were expecting.

 

Once you go MP though overall perf/mm2 can get questionable.

 

A lot of the characteristics of the Mali design and even some of the benchmark sub-tests show potential individually, but I'm wondering if they didn't give perf/power enough of a priority over perf/area.

Plus, IMG really thought through the multi-core approach with their ability to also scale vertex work, keeping MP designs efficient despite unavoidable overhead/redundancy.

 

The triangle throughput of it's VS unit may be slightly over specced for a single pipe, but it's shading throughput is marginal, particularly when they go to 4 rasteriser pipes.

 

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/03/samsungs-exynos-4210-flexes-3d-gaming-muscle-at-gdc-2011-video/

Not a whole lot of geometry and a bit of pixel shader effects (lots of bump-mapping in those asteroids), but it is rendering 1080p@60fps.

 

Think it's 3D so it's actually 1080p @ 60Hz x 2, however kinda looks OGLES1.1 content.

 

http://blogs.arm.com/multimedia/425-mobile-game-graphics-going-high-end/

Dunno but I'd take the Rage tech-demo or Infinity Blade any day over that model that seems to suffer from constipation in that link above.

 

The differences in the versions of Epic Citadel/Infinity Blade were captured in pics at Epic's forum.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1509113&highlight=infinity+blade#post1509113

 

That's not my point; artistic work or even Carmack's "black magic texture streaming tricks" can more than often give far more atmospheric graphics than a crap-load of ultra-advanced features (which there apparently aren't any in that asteroid demo).

 

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos 4210

Exynos 4210

 

So their internal design isn't ready and they're sourcing from an external vendor? The new Galaxy tabs aren't due until June right?

Would they have some other tablet product using their own SOC later this year?

Isn't T3 tablets suppose to be out later this year with quad-core CPU? If that's the case, Samsung may have to use that as well, unless their SOC can at least match the T3.


Seems like every major tablet except iPad is using T2, at least for the first half to 8 months of 2011.

 

The playbook springs to mind (omap4)

 

Also, the tablets using dual-core Qualcomm SoCs.

 

Tegra 2 is in all of the Honeycomb designs; since it's the only chip Honeycomb is optimized for currently.

Others will come but they'll come later than T2 tablets.