Samsung outs 'retina display' ARM chippery World+Dog is drooling over Samsung's latest ARM chip, the dual-core Exynos 5250, announced this week. What has got the saliva flowing? The 2GHz clock speed, a memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/s, DisplayPort support and the ability to pump out graphics at resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600. The catch: the 32nm, Cortex A15-based chip …
...................,in the current circumstances, Samsung are willing to sell Apple jack shit from their latest and greatest. In fact, unless Cupertino at last start to play nice I can see Sammy (given that there will be plenty of OEMs who will want this for their Win8 ARM tabs) saying - "see that camel?" to the fruit company.
FOUR different quad-core ARM SOC platforms from a herd of OEMs under every brand imaginable, running Android and iOS. Sammy would be well advised to let us have our Android. If they want to try and launch the Windows tablet one more time also, just to see it still won't fly then I'm OK with that. But they better not try to hold back the good stuff for that.
I thought it was bad enough with the rumours about the ipad 3(4/5/6/7/8/9....) about to have screen resolutions at that level. Remember, they have been rumouring these high res displays for over a year now with nothing more than some basic proof of concept prototypes to show for.
IT
WILL
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Going above 1920x1080 on a portable screen smaller than 13" is complete nonsense for several reasons:
1. There is no media out there or websites designed for such a high res, so why waste all those extra pixels? As a marketing buzz word? Give me a 1920x1080 Super AMOLED Plus screen over this any day. Infact 1280x800 would suffice if I can have blisteringly good 3D graphics.
2. nobody will actually notice a difference between a 1920x1080 10" screen or one running at 2560x1600 without a magnifying glass. The galaxy S2 for example actually has a lower res than the iphone 4 in a larger screen and yet nobody has complained it lacks sharpness or detail. Such high pixel densities are nothing more than a marketing gimmick with no real discernible benefits in everyday use.
3. The processing power doesn't exist in a portable format to run 3D at a usable frame rate and quality at that res. A desktop graphics card can just about push a reasonable number of polygons at that resolution whilst drawing over 100W of power. Would you rather have highly detailed environments and complex detailing in portable games running at 1280x800 or sub PS 1 quality running at 2560x1600? I know which I would prefer.
4. Has it dawned on anyone that being able to run at such a high res might have more to do with the ability to hook up your tablet to a big screen than actually being able to show it on the device itself?
So please, put a stop to this nonsense once and for all.
based on what was in the article (ie mentions DisplayPort and driving a high-res display) I was assuming that connecting a proper non-mobile high-res display was exactly what was being described.
Additonally, high end 3D gaming may arguably need a l33t hot-running graphics card for but yer average consumer HD device (Blu-Ray, STB, etc) gets away with just a few watts worth of video electronics.
I'm not seeing a problem here. What am I missing?
tasks like video decoding or image display at high res isn't a problem for the latest mobile chips, the problem lies in the ability to run anything that requires 3D representation - which mostly applies to game. Here each item visible on the screen is built from a collection of polygons and the higher the resolution the more polygons you have to show on screen to maintain the same visual fidelity. Increase the resolution from todays 1280x800 to the proposed 2560x1600 you are increasing the number of pixels by a factor of 4 (x-axis x2 and y-axis x2). For 3D rendering this increases to a factor of 8 (x-axis x2; y-axis x2 & z-axis x2) So simplified the graphics chip would need to be 8x faster just to look as good as a 1280x800 display (I know, there is a lot more to it, but that is the gist of it)
OTOH, often-used antialising does render at higher-than-screen-res, then scale down (interpolate) to make the jaggies less visible.
If your screen has twice the pixel/mm you can probably dial down the AA-ing by a factor 2.
So you render at the same resolution as before, have a little crisper image at the risk that people might be able to make out the jaggies a little better (or just not so, because the single pixel is too damn small and looks exactly the same as the larger interpolated value pixel before).
Not sure why anyone still thinks the main thing holding back "Windows" on ARM is processing power, since Microsoft has made it clear its forthcoming ARM version of "Windows" is just its existing Tiles® OS for phones, marketed as "Windows (Mobile?) 8", or IOW the OS generously "donated" by Palm Inc., a company that actually knew how to make mobile operating systems, unlike Microsoft. It's a shame they weren't asked to design the UI too, or they might have saved Microsoft some embarrassment.
I think the reason for the "declining interest" is therefore pretty-much self evident. Phone 7 currently commands about 0.66% market share (according to Gartner, it's 1.5% for ALL Windows mobile, most of which is WinMo 6.5), so why would Windows 8/ARM a.k.a. Phone 8 be any different? This ain't desktop Windows, folks, and it won't be running any of your Killa Appz® any time soon. Nobody cares.
Good effort by Samsung, though. The Exynos 5250 is a fantastic ARM SoC. I'm sure both Android and GNU/Linux will take full advantage of it.
'As market watcher Forrester Research noted yesterday, declining consumer interest in Windows tabs is going to make it harder for sellers to persuade them to opt for a Windows machine.'
Why do ppl sit up and listen as these 'research' companies come running with these daft theories.
Interest in tablets wanes off just as with everything. Period.
Eventually all whom really need that product have one and then interest wanes off. That's just naturally. The same happened with desktop PC's, featurephones, VCR's, flat-screen TV's, netbooks etc...
Anybody could have 'foretold' that. But if Joe smuck says it, then he's called an idiot. But if Forrester Research speaks... oh boy.
Lets hope there's HDMI too. HDMI Vs DisplayPort always looked to me like a VHS Vs Betamax kind of battle. I just wish the device people would admit HDMI has won.
I don't know which is technically the best, but HDMI has audio and can do the full resolution of my HDTV down a single cable with sensible sized plugs. It's also fitted to just about every TV you can buy. That's what I want in my interconnect system.
And as a further incentive to stick with HDMI, just try typing DisplayPort into the ebuyer search box and look how many monitors show up.
Why is everyone thinking 'windows tablets' and microsofts OS? To me, this has samsung galaxy s3 phone written all over it. So far all the leaked specs seem dubious at best, but i think 2ghz quad core would be quite likely and at the right time. And if so, I think samsung would keep it in house for a while to keep their competitors a technological step behind.
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