SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY
Four or so things we found interesting about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888, its latest 5G chip for high-end Androids
Qualcomm this week unveiled the Snapdragon 888, its latest flagship system-on-chip destined to power next year's top-end Android smartphones. It's usually around this time of the year the US giant tears the covers off another Snapdragon 800-series part, such as the 865 in 2019. The 888 is a continuation of this series. Here …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 15:27 GMT Sgt_Oddball
I must admit...
I very much like the idea of having personal and business on separate VMs since you should never mix work with pleasure... But how long before Android (because let's be honest that's where the vast majority of these chips will goto) supports such this?
It'd be cool to see this on a Gemini type phone device though - having Linux for business and android for pleasure without having to restart would be quiet the boon.
I await to see how well this takes off but it'd probably be a year or so before we see it used in anger.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 19:51 GMT Brad Ackerman
Re: I must admit...
It'd be cool to see this on a Gemini type phone device though - having Linux for business and android for pleasure without having to restart would be quiet the boon.
Maybe something like Gemini that actually provides software updates. Planet can't be bothered to patch at all; they'll happily sell you a £600 device with a two-year-old OS that will never get an update. Holier than Swiss cheese out of the box and it will only get worse.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 20:03 GMT Danny 2
Re: 5nm engraving, wow
"how can you watch multiple 4K videos on a mobile phone screen ?"
One phone to cast to them all.
(To be honest I don't understand this articles details, or indeed many now. I feel like I'm stuck on a sunless planet in a heat death universe watching a spaceship passing over. I'm happy to see it but I know it's not coming to my rescue.)
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 22:39 GMT diodesign
"all of this looks a bit mediocre"
I have to say that does appear to be the case. Apple's set the gold standard in what's possible with Arm CPU design - from big caches to large reordering buffers to optimizations for reference-counting-heavy code.
I didn't want to call it until outside benchmarks and tests are available. And I still totally appreciate that this level of chip, the 888, takes a lot of patience, skill and time to develop. It appears Qualcomm's poured a lot of that effort into things like the camera capture processing and GPU/AI in hope that that makes up for where it doesn't match Apple's A14.
C.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 23:36 GMT doublelayer
Re: Looks a bit crap now we've seen Apple's effort
It should still be remembered that the M1 has a few advantages that this does not. The M1 gets to go in laptops, where it can get more power for longer from the larger battery, while this will go into phones, where the batteries are anemic or ill-designed. The same difference also means that the M1 has an easier way to handle heat production; even in the fanless MacBook Air, the large metal plate under it can work well enough as a heat sink. Phones won't get that. For those reasons, this chip has to spend more time on heat management and providing low-power cores so they can get used for the comparatively easy tasks that phones get asked to do. For the same reason, the A14 cores in the iPhone are clocked lower (and there are half as many fast ones) as the M1.
A comparison may help. For Pi fans, Qualcomm's chip is a lot like the SOC in the Raspberry Pi 4, which overheats often without assistance, whereas the M1 is like the higher speed version in the Pi 400, which gets a large heat dissipation plate. The Pi foundation could afford to clock that up (and so can a user) while the original Pi kept automatically clocking down, even though the base rate was lower.
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Thursday 3rd December 2020 00:32 GMT Dave 126
Re: Looks a bit crap now we've seen Apple's effort
It might be interesting to consider how Qualcomm decide which features to research. How does it predict which end applications will become desirable amongst users? If it listens to phone vendors, which ones? Or does it conduct its own research into user trends? Or does Google lay out what it expects a 2023 mobile phone to do, and Qualcomm works towards that?
Qualcomm's situation in this regard must be very different from that of Apple, who appear to make plans and deliver them with a software hardware combo.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 23:06 GMT tip pc
How far behind Apple are they now?
Qualcomm appear to be the best of the rest but still seem behind the A14 and M1.
Meanwhile Apple are clearly aiming at besting the x86 crowd with their ARM chippery.
If M$ decide to let windows run on Apple silicon then the X86 world will truly be turned on its arse.
I can’t see M$ being excited to want to run windows on this 888.
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Wednesday 2nd December 2020 23:38 GMT doublelayer
Re: How far behind Apple are they now?
Existing Windows on ARM systems have primarily been using Qualcomm's CPUs already. While those have mostly been chips that use more power than the 888, I can't see a reason Microsoft would prevent an OEM trying to use it. It's possible that there are other reasons why chips at that level don't get used for Windows, but I doubt it's because MS cares too much.
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Thursday 3rd December 2020 17:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 888 Subtitles
Many years ago in my BBC engineering days I built a very simple device which interfaced between the automation playout system and a keyer* which used to switch the '888' or 'subitles' graphic on on the symbol into the programme.
It was called the 888-o-matic (with a nod to Wallace and Gromit)
*a device which allows you to cut a hole in one picture and fill the hole with another - often the hole and fill were practically the same when text was involved.
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Thursday 3rd December 2020 17:10 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
But is it practical?
Recent phones using the Qualcomm 865 with 5G have made great sacrifices to support the chipset's bulk and power. The headphone jack is gone, the microSd slot is gone, dual SIM is gone, there's not much onboard storage, and the phone is too big for pockets. It's all chipset, battery, and cameras.
I went with an upper mid-range model on my last phone because a super-fast chip with little else wasn't going to be useful.
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Thursday 3rd December 2020 17:58 GMT doublelayer
Re: But is it practical?
I'm not sure that's true. I did a search on a phone database. Of the 60 known devices with the 865 or 865+, 53 (all but 7) have dual SIM, 16 have 3.5 mm jacks, a different 16 have micro SD card slots, and 3 have all of those features. I don't think it's the SOC that means you don't often see all those features together.
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Thursday 3rd December 2020 21:39 GMT heyrick
Re: But is it practical?
Yup. In a month or so my current contract runs out and will need renewal. That's the time I can pick up a reasonable phone discounted.
I'm currently looking at a Samsung S10, after hitting gsmarena and looking at the specs. No 3.5mm jack? Next!
On rainy weekends, I listen to music and/or watch movies. The battery in my Bluetooth headphones runs for the 3ish hours it takes to do the mowing. It's not up to a Sunday of doing Sweet Fanny Adams. Or listening in bed when I can't sleep (ear buds so I can lie on my side). The jack socket is non negotiable. No socket, no interest, end of discussion.
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