Inside the hottest new mobile devices
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 8:29AM Darwin Smith II There has been quite a bit of talk lately about the powerful chipsets that the hottest devices out are running on and I think it’s about time we talk about them.
TI OMAP 3430 Diagram
The old-news Palm Pre and new hotness the Motorola DROID are both running a version of the Cortex-A8 via their TI OMAP 3430 chipset. The TI OMAP 3430 SoC(system-on-chip) combines the ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 600 Mhz. with a POWERVR SGX 530 graphics core. My own iPhone 3GS uses a Samsung S5PC100 SoC, which also combines an ARM Cortex-A8 processor also running at 600 Mhz. with a POWERVR SGX 530* graphics core.
iPhone 3GS Logic Board
The Toshiba TG01, which is already available, the just announced Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, Acer A1 Liquid and HTC HD2 are all running Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 chipsets. The Snapdragon SoC combines a Scorpion core processor, which is based on the Cortex-A8, with a Qualcomm sixth-generation DSP core.
So what’s the difference between all of them? Well I’ll tell you.
Qualcomm has made a significant investment, supposedly to the tune of several tens of millions of dollars, in customizing the ARMv7 architecture on which the Cortex-A8 is built. Though the Scorpion microprocessor is derived directly from the ARM Cortex-A8 architecture Scorpion’s implementation can process 128 bits of data in parallel, compared to 64 bits on Cortex-A8. The Scorpion core has a few other tricks up its sleve including the ability to shut-down half of its data path to conserve power. The are also many other changes made to increase performance and reduce energy usage.
Using the general MIPS benchmark the Scorpion core pulls off 2100 @ 1 Ghz. and the Cortex-A8 rings in 2000 @ 1 Ghz. Not really a huge advantage for the Scorpion unless you consider that in the Cortex-A8s most 
common implementation it only runs at 600 Mhz., which translates to 1200 MIPS. As a side note, the ARMv6 commonly found in devices like the HTC Hero and Nokia 5800 only manage to register around 740 MIPS at their typical 400-528 Mhz clock rate.
Battery life is always an important topic and while there is more to battery life than just energy consumption by the processor, like wireless radio and big high-resolution screens, it is always a good starting point. The Cortex-A8 is rated at .59 mW/MHz power consumption so for the TI OMAP 3430 that translates to roughly 354mW at 600 Mhz. The Scorpion on the other hand is rated at about .33 mW/Mhz and that comes out to about 330mW at 1 Ghz.
People are using their mobile devices for much more than checking email, text messaging and making phone calls. Gaming and multimedia is very quickly becoming one of the main selling-point of modern mobile electronics, and therefore it is becoming more and more important what kind of entertainment prowess a
platform posesses. The most common measurement for mobile graphics capability is whether or not it has Open GL ES 2.0 support and how many triangles per second it can process. The PowerVR SGX 530 GPU in the TI OMAP 3430 rates at 14 MPolys/s while Qualcomm have benchmarked their Snapdragon chipset at 22 MPolys/s.
Overall it seems that the Snapdragon chipset has a significant advantage over the current TI OMAP 3430 and Samsung S5PC100 chipsets. The thing I love about the world of electronics is how fast things change though. Qualcomm, Samsung and TI have all announced faster, more efficient follow-ups to the current kings of mobile processing.
*Note the graphics core in the iPhone 3GS has not been confirmed and might never be due to Apple’s secrecy.
Mobile platform wars
With all the current mobile platforms out there becoming more alike I wonder if it really matters which one you choose. If you have to choose then, which should it be and why? Over the next few days I hope to explore all the options and lay out all the facts. Also important is the future of each and what we can expect in the far and near future.