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Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
I wonder what the C++ Binary Arm of the Intel Dual Threading will do when it finally comes out next year? It's not long now until the source code of the A Series chips comes out, innit.
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Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
More Tegra 3 (aka Kal-El) goodness!
http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content...a-glowball.jpg http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/05/nvidia-glowball/ http://www.anandtech.com/show/4359/n...adcore-physics VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvaDtshLY8 The demo shows very cool dynamic textured lighting on all pixels in a scene. That's quite impressive fragment performance! They mention that the physics are being handled by 4 cores. The video alludes that this work is being handled by the CPU cores rather than GPU shaders. Asus is lined up to be a partner! Lets hope one of their recently announced devices are carrying this tech for release later on in the year. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Samsung has teamed up with Linaro to release an Exynos 4210 dev board:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....1306724354.jpg http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/29/l...en-development This may make a good alternative to the Pandaboard. The Exynos 4210 is a beast. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Qualcomm is making headlines with an imminent sampling of their new MSM89x0 SoCs, and promising a huge 75% decrease in power consumption on a 28nm fab:
http://androidandme.wpengine.netdna-...on-closeup.jpg http://androidandme.com/2011/05/news...5-lower-power/ We're talking up to 2.5GHz per core, and the new Adreno 320, which could give the Tegra 3 a serious run for its money. The 'Scorpion' core design has been replaced by 'Krait', offering 65% power reduction from similar ARM designs. ARM has a serious contender on its hands. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
ARM is making bold claims this morning, projecting that they will take a whopping 50 percent of the mobile PC market by 2015. Considering that they basically have no foothold in the low/mid-end laptop market, that's a very aggressive claim:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....cortex-a15.jpg http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/30/a...0-per-cent-of/ Intel should be slightly worried about this. Of course, intel has something that ARM doesn't, legacy application support via Windows. ARM has Android, MeeGo, Windows 8 on its side and potentially ChromeOS. This race will likely come down to the software. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
A rumor has it that Nvidia Tegra 3 devices will start appearing THIS FALL! :eek:
http://androidandme.wpengine.netdna-...ore-tablet.png http://androidandme.com/2011/05/phon...let-this-fall/ Rumors are that both Motorola, Asus, and Amazon are in the running to produce the new devices. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Here is Epic Citidel running on an TI Omap 4430 w/ PowerVR SGX540 GPU:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YfgteAvoPY It's impressive that so much performance can be squeezed out of last gen's GPU. I'm curious to know how much of the CPU is being used in this demo. I'm guessing that the static nature of this demo has the GPU handling 99% of the tasks. It's even more impressive considering that the iPhone4's SGX535 is capable of running this smoothly. Methinks that game developers haven't begun to take these chips to their limits. I'm amazed to think of what the A5's SGX543MP2, or the Exynos 4210's Mali400MP4 can do seeing these visuals. These are true current gen GPUs capable of multiplying the performance of the SGX540. At the very least, in game effects could be multiplied with much more shader saturation over the entire scene. Here is the same demo running on the SGX543MP4 of the Sony NGP: VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHSkZbxjG3o Notice the particle effects, rich shadows, and extended geometry of the non-player characters, far vanishing point, god rays, etc. Quite impressive. It would be worth while for the chip manufacturers to hire some developers to create compelling demos to show off the power of these chips rather than dry spec sheets. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Thanks for the video.
Well it was obvious the powerhouse 540 had a lot of kick, but this is untapped potential in the Galaxy S devices (inclusing Galaxy Tab). I think the Mali 400 is a fourway segmhented gpu (not a true quadcore) and due to its underclocking its only as powerful as the GeForce ULP (72something) found in the Nvidia T20 "Tegra2". And we already know the SGX540 is slightly more powerful than the gpu in the Tegra2, so it really is a "current gen" gpu. I'd really like to see games like this enter the Android Market (not TegraZone), especially holding my fingers crossed for the Dreamcast emulator (if written in C++/OGLES2 ... should run decently on SGS/SGTab). That presentation makes a mockery of Tegra "Kal-El" demonstration which is pushed fairly hard (>65%) and is supposedly x100 the performance of Tegra2... seems like only triple the performance to me. edit: I was mistaken, Nvidia said Kal-El is only 5x the performance of T20 Tegra2. What I realize is that the Nvidia team made an error when naming their [internal] chips' names. It should follow as: 1) Wayne (Batman -not a superhero just a regular armed soldier/warrior). 2) Logan (Wolverine -incredible stamina, adamantium bone, self-healing ... slightly more deadly than Batman). 3) Stark (Ironman -impenetrable armour, flight, energy beam...an actual "Super"hero). 4) Kal-El (Superman -nothing can be more powerful than him because the author constantly increases/exhagerates his power every issue to the point of God). Future runs?? Phoenix (Jean-Gray), Dr Manhattan (supernatural being based on the Hindu Primary-Pagan-God Siva), Gallactus (nuff said). |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Quote:
I have no doubt that the T30 will compete favourably with the Exynos 4210, thanks to the 4 CPU cores and added pipelines (12 cores in all, I believe), but the Mali 400 has a few tricks up its sleeve, that begin and end with tile rendering which greatly reduce memory bandwidth and overdraw. I believe that the Mali400 will be able to hold its own against the T30 GPU onslaught. As an aside: The next GLBenchmark test 3.0 will render to an offscreen buffer, which means that we will get a taste of GPU performance that is not distorted by the screen that it is displayed on. A much more accurate comparison. I think that NVidia's tegra has a great marketing campaign. Tegra is becoming a house hold name, and users (like yourself) are demanding it in their devices, but the SoC has yet to prove itself the clear performance champ. That said, I have great faith in Nvidia and their aggressive iterative style, and have expectation that they will eventually take the lead. But I agree, even the SGX540 hasn't seen its true potential, nor other SoCs, and without appealing these strengths to developers they will go untapped; developers will stick to the lowest-common-denominator, rather than maxing out these dormant beasts. They need to get their eyes off of engineering schematics and on to their customers. Case in point: find me two demos of the Mali400MP GPU.... Apple pushes the A5's strengths, NVidia does the same for the Tegra, even Qualcomm is boasting about the very powerful Adreno, but Mali400 is a spec sheet on a single web-page. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Just to follow up my previous point with a non-scientific peek into GLBenchmark 2.0.
Check out the scores for some devices with Mali400 vs. Tegra. Remember the 'Pro' test is the easy one.. Relevent tests: Galaxy SII (Mali400MP @ 800x480): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall :eek: Hardkernel Odroid-A (Mali400MP @ 1366x768): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall LG Optimus 2X (T20 @ 800x480): 800x480):http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall ATRIX 4G (T20 @ 960x540): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall Eee Pad Transformer (T20 @ 1280x800): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall XOOM (T20 @ 1280x800): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall For fun: Galaxy Tab (SGX540 @ 1024x600): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall Galaxy S (SGX540 @ 800x480): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall Iphone4 (SGX535 @ 960x540): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall iPad 2 (SGX543MP2 @ 1024x768): http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedeta...tgroup=overall :eek: The number of pixels of the ODROID-A is roughly the same as the XOOM (~3% higher), but it performs way better. In some cases it quadruples the result -- which is significant. The ODROID-A has 30% more pixels than the iPad 2's 1024x768 resolution, though is outperformed by the SGX543MP2. I'm curious how large of an effect resolution has on performance of these devices as there is a difference between the GSII and the ODROID-A despite similar hardware but different resolution. This is where GLBenchmark3.0 will help as it can render to an offscreen buffer. Now, I know, that this is just one benchmark and certainly doesn't tell the whole story, but it seems that the GPU tests featuring the Mali400MP put it very high in the running. While the full test may give you a general idea, if you look at the low-level results, they tell another story regarding the various strengths of the GPU according to more specific GLBenchmark tests. I'm not so quick to buy into NVidia's marketing hype around the Tegra 2. I would have loved to see the Mali400mp4 in the upcoming Galaxy Tab line of devices. I suppose there's still hope for the Tab 8.9. Now the real trick is to get developers to code actual games for the GPU :D |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Charbax has a hands-on with the Tegra 3 reference tablet:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baXzD1CNIrw Nothing terribly exciting, but the presentation isn't terribly good and the screen glare is horrible, so it's tough to make out details of what is actually going on. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Lots of news for this thread today.
To kick it off, Engadget has a hands-on video of the Kal-El reference tablet and gives a good showing of the 'ball' game as well as 'Lost Planet 2' running on Honeycomb: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....06021351nv.jpg http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/02/n...ands-on-video/ What's cool is that Lost Planet 2 was coded for the PC using Unreal Development Kit, and that it only took a couple of months to port to Android :eek:. While this may mean that many games will be ported to Android shortly, it's impressive that the Tegra3 can handle a low-end PC game with relative ease. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
The next TI OMAP coming is the 4470, which is looking to be a very impressive SoC!
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/441...chip_575px.jpg http://www.anandtech.com/show/4413/t...-core-cortexa9 It features dual general-purpose A9-Cores at 1.8GHz, and a SGX544MP1! This thing should be a graphical monster, though it would have been nice to see additional cores on both the CPU and GPU. I can't wait to see what the SGX544 is capable of... |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
It seems as if SoC makers are lining up to pledge support for Windows 8 running on ARM:
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/441...3703_575px.jpg http://www.anandtech.com/show/4411/w...otebook-demoed http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/06/qua...rsion-windows/ This includes Qualcomm and NVidia to start. In Q2 2012, SoCs will officially have caught up to low/mid-end laptops of today in terms of performance. This makes it possible to run traditional OSs with great performance, but ultra-low power requirements (think all-day battery), instant sleep/wake, and ultra-thin profiles. MS is wise to this trend and forging ahead with Windows 8 in an effort to capture some of the new market, but they will have added competition in the space from Google (Android/ChromeOS), Apple (OSX/iOS), and MeeGo. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Here's a Linaro presentation demonstrating 3 development boards across 2 platforms. Featured is the Quickstart (I.MX53) w/ Ubuntu 11.04, the Pandaboard (OMAP4) w/ Ubuntu 11.04, and the Origin Board (Extynos 4210) w/ Android.
The video showcases low-level demonstrations of various graphical operations (eg. video, composting, simple 3D) VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6objpoz4LQ A bit dry, but still interesting to see a strong effort to move forward with software on ARM and reducing time-to-market all around. |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
This is probably one of my favorite designs/SoCs: The Zii labs ZMS.
Featured in the video below is the ZiiLabs ZMS-20 and the Jaguar Dev board: VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ljSkCgEV-U This is certainly a SoC designed by GPU engineers. Amazing! What's so interesting about this architecture is the amazing array of 48 'stem cell' cores coupled to a dual-core A9 running at 1.6GHz. These 48-cores can be used in traditional OpenGLES applications, or can be general purpose with OpenCL, making for a potential powerhouse of a platform. I say potential because I have very few details on the 48-cores, and there is a software gap that needs to be filled to get to this performance. The basic specs on the cores is that in aggregate they can handle a peak of 36GFlops of power :eek:, but that figure is somewhat meaningless as I doubt complete saturation situations are realistic for real-world situations. The video demo featured honeycomb running, and it was running like hot butter. They also showed a set of filters being run over a live camera feed -- impressive stuff. Of course, it's hard to get a handle on the capabilities without some more specific examples. I would *love* to see a shader saturated OpenGL demo with the cores being used. The beauty of the stem-cell concept is that the cores are completely general and infinitely configurable, meaning that hardware efficiency can literally be programmed via software. For example, a shader heavy game can at run-time provision more cores to shader tasks, and less to game logic or physics. Additionally, 10 cores can be responsible for game logic, whilst the remaining 38 are handling rendering. Additionally, this opens the door to literally program things like tessellation (a 'next gen' chipset technique for improving visuals) without requiring that the die provisions these characteristics in silicon. Amazing. Even performance can scale in weird wild ways with software updates rather than hardware! The name stem-cell was appropriately chosen. To say that this chip has the potential to run rings around the current competition is an understatement. 48 cores is a lot of parallelism, and fully programmable cores can mean big things for performance. But here's the problem: very few developers are leveraging OpenCL and I'm guessing even fewer still are willing to develop for this exotic hardware that has yet to gain traction. If I were ZiiLabs, I would produce an OpenGL driver that did run-time core provisioning to handle graphical tasks. This would make it instantly relevant and allow developers to take advantage of the hardware without changing their development toolchains. I would also include some demos of things that normal chipsets would choke on -- eg. ray-tracing and tesellation. I would also create an OpenCL library that could work in sync with this to rapidly provision cores based on the saturation of the task. Lastly, I would produce an OpenCL OSS forum (or something) to share code and get developers working on this. As of right now, only the PVRSGX543 with the USSE2 engine and this chip are the only SoCs (AFAICT) that support OpenCL, which is a MAJOR advantage in the mobile world looking to eek out every drop of performance. Additionally, the ZMS-40 has been announced (and demoed) which doubles the A9 cores, and 'stem-cell' cores to a whopping 4 CPU, 96 stem cell units :eek:. I can only imagine what's possible on this behemoth. Fark.. I'm so interested in this hardware. I'm excited to wet my beak developing OpenCL applications, and this chipset is a godsend. I sincerely hope that they are able to gain some semblance of traction. A single high-profile demo featuring their silicon could change the industry. I'd love to get more specifics regarding the efficiency of the SC cores. I wonder if they can handle instructions with SIMD. To close, here's a promotional video: VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2yv9WqOZL4 |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
Here is a video of OpenCL demos displaying the performance across the ZMS-08.
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvk6t4Vs66M I'm not sure how the ZMS-08 compares to the ZMS-20 or even the ZMS-40. It seems that there's a different CPU and memory interface, though I'm sure there are other differences as well. The performance is very impressive. The ray tracer runs quite quickly over the stock C implementation on this single A8 core machine (some 8 times faster). These numbers will improve with faster cores and faster memory access. I would love to know the performance of individual stem-cell cores... |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
TI talks the OMAP4470 superchip.
http://photos.prnewswire.com/pb-larg...pg??1307720972 http://newscenter.ti.com/Blogs/newsr...ce-716621.aspx VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DSAjGK-To4 Dual Core 1.8GHz. Impressive, though I would have loved to see more piplines for the graphics processor, and a faster memory interface. It's clear that their aim is convergence starting with this chip. I'm curious to see what types of devices will feature the SoC. ARM is now diving into Intel's territory... quickly... NVidia, Qualcomm and TI have thrown their hats into the ring. Any other takers? |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
TI's OMAP5 processor has been unveiled, and it's a scorcher:
http://focus.ti.com/en/graphics/wtbu...432-SoC_tn.gif http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtb...Other+PR+omap5 VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_wwgTMcGXI It seems that TI was integral in developing the ARM Cortex-A15, which gives them an impressive jump on the competition. The two SoCs are the OMAP5430 and OMAP5432, which seem to differ in their memory interface (LPDDR2 and LPDDR3), package size, and imaging features. They both feature dual Cortex A15 cores with sub Cortex M4 cores running in parallel to offload tasks to when running in low power mode -- hyper cool. All on a 28nm process. These chips will scale to an impressive 2GHz, and I'm expecting that they will give low end Intel CPUs a serious run for their money. An ultra-thin, ultra-light ultra-cool, and ultra-cheap laptop/tablet combo with instant-on, instant-sleep, and days of battery life, is sounding mighty tempting. TI Claims that the A15 will deliver 50% general performance increase at the same clock as competing A9 SoCs while consuming 15% less juice. :eek: Add to that TI claims a dual-core A15, will handily outperform a quad-core A9 (presumably at the same clock). They also tote a couple of PVR SGX544, which seem to have 2 pipelines based on their performance notes (5x vs 2.5x performance of the OMAP4470 which presumably has the MP1). These chips should be quite competent with the latest 3D content which rival current-gen consoles. PowerVR has been the performance leader in this space for quite some time. Here's something that's interesting: the Cortex A15 will handle virtualization as standard feature. This is interesting in that the enterprise server market is SURE to jump on this technology as it is far cooler, far more power efficient, and far cheaper than intels offering in the server space. Virtualization will allow for multiple isolated OS instances to run on a single chip, which is very common for hosts (eg. Amazon AWS EC2). Those individuals that use linux and don't mind a re-compile of their server app, or individuals that wrote in Java are sure to benefit from this new operating environment! This is also when the mobile SoC collides with the traditional desktop CPU. The difference is that this processor will sip less than a Watt in normal usage, whilst maintaining the performance necessary to do 'content creation'. I personally think that the A8's were sufficient for content creation, but I understand how inefficient typical desktop applications are. Sampling for this wonderful SoC will start soon, if it hasn't already, with the first devices slated to land in the summer of 2012. I don't know if it makes sense to hold out for that Tegra 3 (presumably at the end of this year)! This beast is sure to eat its lunch mere months after its launch. I can't wait to see what Qualcomm comes up with. Can the MSM8960 compete? |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
In this post, Qualcomm talks about the asynchronous cores in the MSM8660.
http://armdevices.net/2011/06/02/qua...computex-2011/ VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAemoivm30 By running asynchronously, these cores can run at different frequencies and thus scale power usage based on load, saving battery life. Very cool. I really like some of the moves that qualcomm is making. BTB, the game in the background is called ilomilo and has great graphics and a fresh style. You can find out more about snapdragon 'optimized' titles here: http://gaming.qualcomm.com/ |
Re: Mobile System on Chip Thread
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Here's a lovely slide presentation that I found that compares the die sizes of a Cortex A9 to Intel's Atom and i7 (amongst other things):
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/...ARM_Cortex.pdf Now, don't get me wrong, there are quite a few differences in the structure of these processors which will impact efficiency in different areas, so this shouldn't be taken as a straight comparison. But it's interesting to see the drastic differences between the die size of the Cortex CPU vs the Intel variants and noting the transistor count. For example, a dual-core A9 has around half the transistors of an Atom 270, but 1/5 the size! The size of the whole SoC brings the size of the die to parity with the early Atom CPU, though still far below that of the i7. I wish I knew more about the architecture to make sense of what's going on. Could it be the ARM RISC instructions bringing down the size, a lack of features, or just better engineering? I wonder how ARM would look with similar features as an IA32 CPU. And quite randomly.... Here's an ARM presentation that talks about A9 as a general computing platform: PDF: http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/O...tation_v2a.pdf |
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