Qualcomm shows at the Mobile World Congress the first hardware which is powered by a new 28nm-soc with four ‘Krait’cores. According to the company is the first consumer hardware components with the chip in the second half of 2012.
The APQ8064-soc was earlier this month announced, but will be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the first time, working shown. The company has a tablet on display, which is designed for soft – and hardware development, mobile development platform, which is equipped with the 28nm-quad-core-chip. An employee did not let the tablet by attendees tested was; there turned only a demo to the computing power on the screen to demonstrate.
On the screen were simultaneously four video streams by the processor cores and decoded. Each stream was individually started and paused, clearly to see how the clock speed of the cores thereby varied. According to Qualcomm, can each core separately clocked, and it is also possible to use a core switch as the load is low. The demonstration served purely to have the computing power to demonstrate; the soc also includes a video processor which, in normal use, the processing of video streams.
The processor cores in the APQ8064 are based on the Krait design. The manufacturer has only the instruction set from ARM license and build a processor around it. Many other manufacturers are also taking a standaardchipontwerp licensed by ARM. Krait is the successor to Scorpion, the architecture of the last two years by Qualcomm was used. The new design must have a substantial speedups and in addition less power consumption.
The soc includes four processing cores and a Adreno 320 gpu. This should be according to Qualcomm a lot faster than the current top model, the Andreno 225. This is for example found in the dualcore Snapdragon S4 soc that is used in the recently announced HTC One S smartphone. With light use would the quadcore chip as economical as the dualcore variant, because the extra cores disabled.
Samples of the APQ8064 are currently partners sent, the first of which are only recently of the band come rolling in, so could a staff member tell us. As expected, the first devices with the APQ8064 in the second half of this year.