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View Full Version : Samsung Unveils 533MHz Mobile Processor


Ed Hansberry
07-21-2003, 06:00 AM
<a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030720/205006_1.html">http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030720/205006_1.html</a><br /><br />"Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the S3C2440, the world's fastest mobile CPU, with a core speed of 533MHz. The new mobile CPU will drive the emergence of new services, functions and multimedia content for mobile handheld devices such as PDAs and smartphones."<br /><br />The 1940 iPAQ uses a S3C2410 chip which is from the same ARM920T core as this S3C2440, so that means it is in the older ARMv4 family, not the ARMv5 family with the X-Scale. At those speeds though, it doesn't matter. <i><b>This</b></i> is why MS refused to optimize for X-Scale specifically. :way to go: We have some serious competition now in Pocket PC chips. 300MHz, 400MHz and the 533MHz chip are expected to go into mass production by the fourth quarter of this year.

Enderet
07-21-2003, 06:08 AM
I can already imagine the new axims using this processor. w00t. The 2210 is going to have a competitor. Hehehe

ricksfiona
07-21-2003, 06:30 AM
More speed is a good thing... I'm surprised it's taken this long to go up from 400MHz. I was thinking somewhere in the 700MHz range by now. I know there are more issues with electronics this small....

Enderet
07-21-2003, 06:34 AM
Well I just remembered that Intel already has a 600mhz ppc processor. If only I could find the link. Damn. Anyone else remember reading this? If im not mistaken this was on Intels site. :(

ricksfiona
07-21-2003, 06:37 AM
Well I just remembered that Intel already has a 600mhz ppc processor. If only I could find the link. Damn. Anyone else remember reading this? If im not mistaken this was on Intels site. :(
Woooh, 600MHz would be WAAAAY nice.

ConceptVBS
07-21-2003, 07:46 AM
More speed is a good thing... I'm surprised it's taken this long to go up from 400MHz. I was thinking somewhere in the 700MHz range by now. I know there are more issues with electronics this small....

Thats because of a monopoly by Intel and thus a lack of innovation.

Update from Samsung:

They are planning to release 1GHz mobile CPU by the end of next year.

We need innovators like Samsung to boost performance levels and cut down costs. This is great news for all of us.

Jfenix
07-21-2003, 08:59 AM
8O

Considering the 266Mhz chip in the 1940 is almost equal(and sometimes better) than the 400Mhz X-Scale chips in other models, this is probably going to be an excellent alternative to intel chips. Unless the PXA 26X is a lot faster than current X-Scales...

maximus
07-21-2003, 10:02 AM
higher speed = higher power consumption = lower battery life ...

Ed Hansberry
07-21-2003, 12:24 PM
higher speed = higher power consumption = lower battery life ...
Except my 400MHz X-Scale 2215 gets better battery life than did my ~80MHz Nino from 1998. It is also better than the 206MHz battery life of my 3600 when it was new.

Timothy Rapson
07-21-2003, 12:29 PM
The things that jazz me about this are:

Competition is good. More speed, lower prices, more features.

The camera function built-in.

Samsung is huge volume and can do everything from the chip to the support software (they have their own hardware abstraction layer for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile 2003) to the case design. I am pretty sure they make screens from scratch and they are one of the largest if not the largest memory chip manufacturers in the world.

.13 micron. The smaller a chip the faster AND the less power. I believe .13 is as small as it gets right now.

We could get a ton of new features: voice recognition, optical scanning of pages of text (through that camera that has built-in support) coverted to text right on the PPC, new levels of compression for video and audio that would allow us to save more on less flash space, and......drum roll......HIGHER RESOLLUTION SCREENS without slowdown!

Fishie
07-21-2003, 12:35 PM
Now THIS is very good. Good competition, lower prices, faster speeds.
DO not let XSCALE DOWN however!
Please remember that even thought it's current speed is 400 mhz the processor was designed to handle up to 1ghz!

Intel has a history of EXPENSIVE and Very well thought out processor design.

Just look at the multi-billion dollar Itanium... (even though not designed for the public/end user)

You have one company putting all it's money and time toward one thing: Processors, and then you have samsung which has only a small share in the processor market. Which one would be most likely to pull out of the market in 5 years?

Either way we have achieved a plateau... in the home desktop computer that is ( exlude xtreme gamers & powerusers ) where we don't need a faster computer... or we care VERY LITTLE about the speed because it is no longer a bottleneck on our daily routines. And that plateau is about to reach our handhelds. Tap Tap Tap, the information is in front of you... kinda reminds me of the xscale adaptation of the Palm

Actually Samsung might be the next Sony.
They have been growing at an enormous rate and are not in the habit of abandoning the ventures they enter.
Unknown to the mainstream public they have become an electronics powerhorse who supply just about everything.
You might not know it but all of you have Samsung products.

Timothy Rapson
07-21-2003, 12:51 PM
I saw a cover story recently where US NEWS (?) interviewed the head of Samsung and was surprised that they did not want to be the next Sony. They were just as happy not to hype, set proprietary standards, overdo styling, and such that Sony are known for. They just want to manufacture B+ equipment and sell it for less.

That is right where I want a manufacturer to be. I would far rather have something that does the job well at a reasonable price that something that is the latest and greatest for a premium price.

This Samsung news and their entry into PPC with the H1910 and X3 will be very good for them and for us.

TawnerX
07-21-2003, 01:49 PM
apparently the speed gain is among other because the moved the mask from .18 to .13.

It is scheduled for production in Q4 so I guess we can see a h1945 look a like with camera built in early next year.

GoldKey
07-21-2003, 04:07 PM
I've owned numerous Samsung products and never been disappointed. I have an 18 year old TV made by them and it still works great. Just bought one of their Side-by-side refrigerators at BestBuy and am very impressed.

don dre
07-21-2003, 04:12 PM
I've always been happy with samsung products and I can't stress enough how important competition is. If anybody remembers how much Intel used to charge for new desktop proc's before AMD made som einroads knows what I mean. And what's amazing is what AMD did with a small fraction of Intel's budget.

danmanmayer
07-21-2003, 05:06 PM
Does this mean full screen video that doesn't stall out all the time? I would love to be able drop to play video that doesn't drop frames fullscreen. I would also love to be able to just drop video on and play it. Meaning I don't have to waste time reencoding it just to put it on my pocket pc. Sounds good and I LOVE competition! hehe

ConceptVBS
07-21-2003, 08:23 PM
higher speed = higher power consumption = lower battery life ...

higher speed = lower power consumption = higher battery life. :D

Heres why:

The 266Mhz Samsung S3C2410 mobile handheld CPU used in HP's Ipaq 1940 is based on 0.18 micron technology and uses 1.8V. This new chip uses 0.13 micron technology and consumes only 1.3V.

jage
07-22-2003, 12:31 AM
Does this mean full screen video that doesn't stall out all the time? I would love to be able drop to play video that doesn't drop frames fullscreen. I would also love to be able to just drop video on and play it. Meaning I don't have to waste time reencoding it just to put it on my pocket pc. Sounds good and I LOVE competition! hehe

Well, I for one has been watching full screen video that doesn't stall for about one year now on PocketPC. Pocket MVP (ex Pocket-Divx player) is pretty good. :)

jage
07-22-2003, 12:37 AM
Sure, it's 533MHz. But does it matter? How big cache? How high cache latency? What kind of memory bus it supports?

I ranted about these things before, over here:
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15088.

R K
07-22-2003, 02:59 AM
It's basically the 266MHz Samsung CPU used in the iPAQ H1940 with the MHz rating boosted 200%. This is not a change in the entire CPU architecture that's found on the Intel StrongArm to XScale jump.

This is pretty exciting news. It's practically as exciting as it would be if Intel announced the availability of a 412MHz StrongArm CPU or an 800MHz XScale CPU.

jage
07-22-2003, 03:11 AM
It's basically the 266MHz Samsung CPU used in the iPAQ H1940 with the MHz rating boosted 200%. This is not a change in the entire CPU architecture that's found on the Intel StrongArm to XScale jump.

This is pretty exciting news. It's practically as exciting as it would be if Intel announced the availability of a 412MHz StrongArm CPU or an 800MHz XScale CPU.

Not so sure... if it's like last gen Samsung, 16kB data cache/16kB code cache doesn't excite me too much. Doubling the core frequency might not help much at all. Thus I can't say I'm that excited at all. I hope the best, though...

maximus
07-24-2003, 02:40 AM
.13 micron. The smaller a chip the faster AND the less power. I believe .13 is as small as it gets right now.


They already moved to .09 micron by now.

maximus
07-24-2003, 02:45 AM
higher speed = higher power consumption = lower battery life ...

higher speed = lower power consumption = higher battery life. :D

Heres why:

The 266Mhz Samsung S3C2410 mobile handheld CPU used in HP's Ipaq 1940 is based on 0.18 micron technology and uses 1.8V. This new chip uses 0.13 micron technology and consumes only 1.3V.

My high school teacher told me that P=V*I .. power = voltage * current.
Lowering the voltage does not automatically lower the power consumption ....

ctmagnus
07-24-2003, 06:34 AM
My high school teacher told me that P=V*I .. power = voltage * current.
Lowering the voltage does not automatically lower the power consumption ....

But if you keep current constant and lower the voltage, then you do get lower power consumption.

P=I*V (or W=I*V, as I learned :wink: )

if V is halved (for example), you get P=I*(V/2) or P=(I*V)/2

So halving the voltage supplied will also halve the power output.

maximus
07-25-2003, 01:42 AM
assuming the current is constant, of course ?

Kati Compton
07-25-2003, 02:24 AM
They might be able to keep it approximate, but it's unlikely it'd be exact, because a different layout would likely have at least a slightly different resistance.

maximus
07-25-2003, 06:44 AM
Different resistance AND different number of transistors.

The more transistors you have on a chip usually means bigger current. :Fade-color