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  • CaptainDoug - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    This should make for amazing battery life. As a quad core it should also have a decent amount of power and the Adreno 305 is no slouch either. All of these parts aren't exactly high end as far as performance but they should be enough to run most anything well all while sipping the battery. sign me up.
  • Silenux - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    The only problem I see is that OEM will pack this with small batteries and it will still give a short battery life.
    Hopefully they put this on 2100 battery minimum.
  • amdwilliam1985 - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    Yeah, I can totally see cheap OEM going with small batteries.

    Starting 2013, we should see 2000mah+ and up, hoping to see more 3000mah+ devices.

    If Motorola can do it with their Maxx, then I'm sure Samsung and HTC can do it too :)
  • lmcd - Saturday, December 15, 2012 - link

    I'm pretty sure the battery in the SIII is > 2000mah, which is why I make a whole day on it with heavy usage patterns.
  • Roland00Address - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    How small is this chip for a7 are a big step down from Krait?

    Yes there are limitations about using DMips/Mhz per core but if I remember

    a7 are about 1.9 DMIPS / MHz per core
    krait are about 3.3 DMIPS / MHz per core (aka about 73% higher)
    a15 are about 3.5 DMIPS / MHz per core (aka about 84% higher)
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    Those krait numbers are bogus.
    Tom's ran linpack and found krait to be around 2.7 dmips/mhz
    Also the s4 pro has a poorer memory interface than the dual core s4.
  • tuxRoller - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    Make that 2.5 dmips/mhz on dhrystone.
  • ET - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    A7 is a replacement for A8 that's smaller, more power efficient and support multi-core and some newer technologies. It's not meant to compete with the top of the line ARM CPU's, but I think it's pretty exciting as a low end core.
  • amdwilliam1985 - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    Yep, this will help bringing up the bottom line of the low and mid spec phones.
  • Wolfpup - Saturday, December 15, 2012 - link

    Ooooh okay it's a revised A8? I was thinking it was a revised A9 for some reason. Wasn't one of the ideas for it to be paired with multiple A15s to run stuff when it doesn't need that much performance? Sort of what Nvidia did with a lower speed A9 in Tegra 3?

    Hmm....if it's basically an A8, I guess I don't understand the point of doing a quad, when you can do 2-4 A9s...like wouldn't 2 or 3 A9s give about the same performance?

    And I REALLY don't understand the point of a quad A5. The A5 is basically an ARM 11, almost a 486, just with instruction support for ARM v7 while ARM 11 is v6?

    Seems like it makes more sense to just do 1-2 A9s instead of 4 A5s?

    I don't really get it...maybe A9 is proportionally larger than the performance it gives you or something, but anyway it's kind of fun that these weird parts exist!

    Those Qualcom designs really throw me off, because I never know if they're talking about their core that's basically an A8, or the one that's basically an A9.
  • lmcd - Saturday, December 15, 2012 - link

    A9 wasn't actually that appealing of a core. There was some part of the A9 that was gimped, something that really didn't make sense to gimp. Unfortunately my tiny little brain can't remember what. I'm pretty sure it wasn't gimped in A8. Besides, A7 is like 1/4 the die space of an A9, and only really loses out due to the OoO architecture loss, which doesn't seem as huge when you have four cores to deal with those bottlenecks.

    I remember it (right now) as Krait and non-Krait. Non Krait is basically an A8. Krait is halfway between A9 and A15 and doesn't seem to have the exact weakness the A9 does.
  • GrizzledYoungMan - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Because, honestly, I can't keep these f'ing things straight. You know, something that gives a good overview of the history of each part, it's intended usage, power characteristics, basic architectural features (in order, out of order, etc etc etc).

    Not trying to give you more work, Brian, although something tells me you'd relish the challenge.
  • MadMan007 - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ARM_microproc...
  • ET - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    ARM has a page on its CPU's: http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/in...

    Click the Compare Processors tab.

    (That of course doesn't include non-ARM cores.)
  • GrizzledYoungMan - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - link

    All helpful, thanks, but not exactly what I'm referring to. I'm thinking of something that is more narrative, and offers a bit of analysis (and depth) as to the practical implications of these architectural changes and evolutions.
  • agag - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    I don't think that information is out there in a coherent form. I worked at Qualcomm for a year and it took me at least six months to have any idea what was going on.
  • 1008anan - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link

    When does MSM8x26 hit cell phones?

    I don't see the point of four A7 Cortex cores that are not combined with at least one high single threaded performance core.

    Almost all cell phone applications depend on single threaded performance (since our libraries and tool-sets that use parallel multi-threaded power efficient code are so incomplete.) Wouldn't a cell phone powered by an Apple Swift A6 core (or Krait/A15 equivalent) with one A7 or cortex M4 companion core (that kicks in when the high performance core is turned off) be higher performance with better battery life? For that matter a single Intel Atom Z Medfield would probably have better performance and probably better battery life (because of how fast it switches between active states)

    Brian, could you explain QCOM's rational?
  • lmcd - Saturday, December 15, 2012 - link

    I really want to see an A15 paired with two A7s, full-on Adreno 320 graphics, and a small graphics coprocessor for compositing like TI had on their 4470. The A7s and coprocessor would be really efficient and make for a great battery life, while the A15 and 320 would make for great performance in games.

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