I'm just going to drop in here and say that some of the stuff I've been reading from MWC is absolutely insane.
Tegra 3 chips demoed?!
TI OMAP 4430's upclocked SGX 540 outperforming Tegra 2?!
Galaxy S II's Mali-400MP GPU benchmarked!
Qualcomm's successor to Scorpion?!
Cortex-A15 news!
As you can see, AnandTech wins my approval for the best articles. As usual, they provide well-written, well-researched articles that manage to dig up tidbits of SoC information that I'm not able to find anywhere else (and ultimately are accurate!) I'll give AndroidAndMe the runner-up because when it comes to NVIDIA's Tegra platform, Taylor Wimberly keeps his ear to the ground.
I recommend reading through AnandTech's Smartphones section for some great info as to what the SoC future holds in store for us (and the future looks bright!) If you're pondering getting a Tegra 2 phone, trust that AndroidAndMe will keep you up to date on any developments.
I hate to say it boys and girls, but these guys have got everything covered... I've got no inside scoop this time around. That said, I'm glad to see more tech blogs take a much more interested and informed approach to SoC comparison compared to a year ago, and manufacturers are releasing much more information about their chips now that the mobile market is interested in more than just clock speeds.
Thank you, tech bloggers. I originally wrote my Hummingbird vs Snapdragon article out of frustration with the amount of poor information available to those wanting to compare or understand ARM hardware. Since then, perhaps due to the increased availability of information available by the SoC manufacturers, we're seeing much-more informed articles about ARM hardware making it out to the masses.
I may end up on the sidelines, but I'm happy knowing that readers have a lot better reading material to base their smartphone investment upon!
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Fun with Tasker Part I: Weather-adaptive alarm clock.
One of those things I always dreamed of having was an alarm clock that woke me up early on those mornings where Mother Nature decided to hand me a nice blizzard before work or school to struggle through.
A couple months back I started playing with Tasker, an amazing Android application that you've probably already heard me gush about in previous posts. In short, for about the price of a Value Meal at McDonalds, Tasker allows you to set up triggers on your phone that you can use to carry out a virtually limitless set of actions. And really, that'll pay for itself, because you can set it up to do countless things for you that other applications charge for. I've got a bunch of profiles I've set up and I'll be sharing them here on my blog over a period of time.
So I'll cut to the chase. I used Tasker to create a weather-adaptive alarm clock, and posted the profile on Tasker's Wiki page, so feel free to try it out!
http://tasker.wikidot.com/weather-clock
A couple months back I started playing with Tasker, an amazing Android application that you've probably already heard me gush about in previous posts. In short, for about the price of a Value Meal at McDonalds, Tasker allows you to set up triggers on your phone that you can use to carry out a virtually limitless set of actions. And really, that'll pay for itself, because you can set it up to do countless things for you that other applications charge for. I've got a bunch of profiles I've set up and I'll be sharing them here on my blog over a period of time.
So I'll cut to the chase. I used Tasker to create a weather-adaptive alarm clock, and posted the profile on Tasker's Wiki page, so feel free to try it out!
http://tasker.wikidot.com/weather-clock
Sunday, January 16, 2011
More on Samsung; the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Well my last post was the good... now we're about to see some of the bad and ugly. I've been on XDA-developers.com a lot in the last couple months, (I've got over 100 posts there). Today an anonymous tipster posted some insight into why none of the Samsung Galaxy S phones have received Android 2.2 (FroYo) officially yet.
Anyhow, read past the break, I'll let his post speak for itself.
Anyhow, read past the break, I'll let his post speak for itself.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Mystery (probably) solved; how Samsung pulls off its GPU magic.
EDIT - Hmm. One of my readers (who has been an enormous resource in the past) has posted below in the comments why I am likely incorrect in my theory. Be sure to check out the comments at the end of the article!
So, despite my efforts to pull myself away from ARM architecture, Android, and specifically, the mysteries surrounding the Hummingbird processor, I can never really extract myself. One of these days I'll get around to obsessing over something else (hopefully career-related) but until then, I'll let you know what I think I've uncovered as the solution to how Samsung solved the GPU bandwidth issue (which I puzzled over in my original Hummingbird vs. Snapdragon article.)
There have been a few opportunities where I've had to step in and correct people when they post that a Galaxy S phone has only ~320 megs of RAM. It's an error I see made frequently when people use Android system info applications that can only see the 320 megs of volatile memory, despite the fact that the phone does actually contain 512 megs of RAM. We see it happen every time a new Galaxy S phone is leaked, even the Nexus S.
The explanation for this has always been that a certain amount of memory have been "reserved" by Samsung for the Android OS, and that memory is not visible nor available to applications. Despite this, I've never been able to figure out exactly how the system provides the 12.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth it (theoretically) needs to push out 90 million triangles/sec with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU.
I'm not quite sure how it happened, but in my meanderings across the interwebs, I ran across the following image on odroid.com, of the block diagram of the S5PC110 that they use for their developer board.
So, despite my efforts to pull myself away from ARM architecture, Android, and specifically, the mysteries surrounding the Hummingbird processor, I can never really extract myself. One of these days I'll get around to obsessing over something else (hopefully career-related) but until then, I'll let you know what I think I've uncovered as the solution to how Samsung solved the GPU bandwidth issue (which I puzzled over in my original Hummingbird vs. Snapdragon article.)
There have been a few opportunities where I've had to step in and correct people when they post that a Galaxy S phone has only ~320 megs of RAM. It's an error I see made frequently when people use Android system info applications that can only see the 320 megs of volatile memory, despite the fact that the phone does actually contain 512 megs of RAM. We see it happen every time a new Galaxy S phone is leaked, even the Nexus S.
The explanation for this has always been that a certain amount of memory have been "reserved" by Samsung for the Android OS, and that memory is not visible nor available to applications. Despite this, I've never been able to figure out exactly how the system provides the 12.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth it (theoretically) needs to push out 90 million triangles/sec with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU.
I'm not quite sure how it happened, but in my meanderings across the interwebs, I ran across the following image on odroid.com, of the block diagram of the S5PC110 that they use for their developer board.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Friends don't let friends use Quadrant...
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Insights into the MicroSD card black markets...
Trust me, if China's hardware black market fascinates you like it does me, you'll find this blog post very interesting.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
I've never read anything else by this guy, but apparently he's a production manager for the Chumby, which is a rather interesting piece of hardware itself, particularly if you're the kind that likes to tinker.
Essentially, his production line ran into a rash of quality control failures and upon investigation, he found that Kingston had sold him a large batch of MicroSD cards from a very questionable source.
He goes into great detail and even drops a bunch of chips into acid to find out where they actually originated from. I learned a lot reading this article, and will undoubtedly be looking much closer at the SD cards I purchase in the future...
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
I've never read anything else by this guy, but apparently he's a production manager for the Chumby, which is a rather interesting piece of hardware itself, particularly if you're the kind that likes to tinker.
Essentially, his production line ran into a rash of quality control failures and upon investigation, he found that Kingston had sold him a large batch of MicroSD cards from a very questionable source.
He goes into great detail and even drops a bunch of chips into acid to find out where they actually originated from. I learned a lot reading this article, and will undoubtedly be looking much closer at the SD cards I purchase in the future...
Flaws in Quadrant demonstrate the need for care when analyzing benchmarks
Android benchmark enthusiasts, check out this article: http://briefmobile.com/cyanogen-demonstrates-quadrants-flaws
I'm not sure how I've missed this article, but it's quite interesting. I knew that the problem with the Quadrant I/O performance in the Galaxy S phones (causing them to score significantly below phones like the Droid X, which do not have as powerful a CPU or GPU) could be remedied on the I9000 Galaxy S and the Captivate using a fix from XDA developers.
The above article demonstrates however that the issue may go beyond the way the file system is set up in the Galaxy S. While the fix does produce actual performance gains on the hardware, phones like my Epic 4G apparently have no need for the fix. While Quadrant scores are still affected, Samsung appears to have made changes to the file system on the Epic 4G to allow for quicker loading of data from NAND flash instead of the SD card.
TL;DR - An I/O bug in other Galaxy S phones was rectified in the Epic 4G, but the performance gain is not reflected by Quadrant benchmarks.
I'm not sure how I've missed this article, but it's quite interesting. I knew that the problem with the Quadrant I/O performance in the Galaxy S phones (causing them to score significantly below phones like the Droid X, which do not have as powerful a CPU or GPU) could be remedied on the I9000 Galaxy S and the Captivate using a fix from XDA developers.
The above article demonstrates however that the issue may go beyond the way the file system is set up in the Galaxy S. While the fix does produce actual performance gains on the hardware, phones like my Epic 4G apparently have no need for the fix. While Quadrant scores are still affected, Samsung appears to have made changes to the file system on the Epic 4G to allow for quicker loading of data from NAND flash instead of the SD card.
TL;DR - An I/O bug in other Galaxy S phones was rectified in the Epic 4G, but the performance gain is not reflected by Quadrant benchmarks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
