
tax free phone?
(see title)
HTC is preparing an onslaught in the mobile marketplace by launching the first quad-core handset in 2012. The Taiwanese manufacturer is reportedly preparing to release the HTC Edge next year, a smartphone with a 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, PocketNow reports. HTC Edge According to "reliable sources", the HTC Edge …
Ah, the old days when computers couldn't multi-CPU very well at all....who on earth would have needed TWO cores in their computer??? Now we have EIGHT core CPUs...how will we ever use all of those?
</sarcasm>
The hardware has to come first before people can write software that will use it. Imagine if Modern Warfare 3 had been written back in the N64 days... I'm sure they would have loved to do it, but no one could have played it.
The presence of a fifth extremely low power core for network monitoring and other low-power-required stuff should do the trick for longer life in this phone, if you're not watching HD movies on it. NVidia says the power use overall is no worse than Tegra 2 also. Should be a neat piece of gear.
See title. The ARM will likely be less powerful than an equivalent-clocked x86 CPU, however it will most likely have a higher MIPS-per-watt rating, hence ARM's use in low-power hardware like phones and portable games consoles. Intel have tried to get into the MIPS-per-watt competition with the Atom chips, but it's still something of a one-horse race.
Except the ARM mentioned has out-of-order speculative superscalar issue and none of the traps associated with byte-oriented instruction decode of a legacy ISA, so in fact it's probably just as fast in-core as an x86 of the generation mentioned, and it probably has a faster RAM interface too.
Damn right it'll flay the x86 part on MIPS per watt too.
Keep up - ARM are :)
Now THAT was a beast. 8 cores, and it was in microsoft's zune (remember that? No, me neither.) At least that was claimed at the time - it turned out that the 8 cores included things like the power management controller, the memory controller, and the big fat controller. Oh, and one small, underpowered CPU core.
I stopped looking at specs back then, all that matters is how well it runs actual software and how useful it is as a phone (and yes battery life is right at the top of that particular list!)
This is a useless gimmick - there's simply no need for a quad core phone.
HTC should stop releasing 50 handsets a year and concentrate on 3 or 4 core products. How abourt a low end (Wildfire S), Mid Range (Desire S) and top end (Sensation) - refreshed just once a year, with a commitment to release Android updates on time, for 3 years from launch?
One core handling the music playing, while the other is dealing with whatever the web browser is trying to throw at it, another dealing with any background tabs that might have some kind of html5 goodness requiring some kind of constant attention, and underneath all that another core getting loaded up with OS services and stray browser processes and making sure there's no ugly UI stuttering or lag when someone interrupts all that lot by daring to interrupt you with a phone call...
Yes I can see a use for four cores, or maybe even more, if their idle current consumption is low enough. That's not including whatever 3D gubbins is bolted onto the latest generation of Internet terminal/portable games machine/media device that people call a "phone" these days.
my arm11 based e71 still does whatever i need from a phone.
full qwerty for messaging - check
robust email and calender support to sync with office - check
expandable memory to store mostly songs and the odd data - check
FM / MP3 player for those times when i get bored - check
GPS with google maps for when i get lost - check
Wifi for when i want to stream youtube / internet radio - check
midnight pool for when i'm visiting the guv - check
battery that lasts for days instead of hours - check
superb voice quality when making calls - check
bluetooth to pair with my laptop, handsfree other phones - check
it even has infrared though it's been ages since i used that
so what exactly am i missing?
"Except the ARM mentioned has out of order..."
So did the P4.
"speculative..."
So did the P4.
"superscalar issue"
Yep. And the P4 issued 3 instructions per cycle, rather than 2.
"usual vague references to the microcode decoder"
Almost every processor - including many ARMs - have microcode. Performance impact is negligible.
"faster RAM interface"
Judging by ARM memory performance thus far, I'm extremely skeptical.
Was also, clock for clock, slower than a P3.
If I recall correctly* it wasn't until the P4 hit something like 1.8 Ghz that it could match a P3
* I never had one because Athlons was the CPU of choice back then and Pentium 4's were relegated to mainstream brands selling underspecc'ed crap with "intel Inside!" stickers to clueless high street buyers.
...but I'd skip the one with the dead horse in it.
This phone will arrive nicely in time for my upgrade - and hopefully there won't be any of the current nonsense for this beastie as there is about fitting newer stuff onto older kit. Well, at least not until after the contract has actually finished...
Prep for ARM's ultrabook assault.
Scale up those pads and give a reasonable cpu for those with desktop apps to port to. Once the desktop apps are there, it's a smaller jump to the ultrabook format.
Are multiple cores better than higher Ghz on low-power systems?
We're not in phone-land anymore Toto!