Xscale slow?

[mookie123]

There is a big debate brewing on the net right now claiming that Palm's Tungsten T is "faster" than PocketPC. This claim apparently is based on Kinoma Beta 1.5 video player "fps" number.

1. Kinoma running on NR gives about 60fps
2. Kinoma running on NX with 200Mhz Xscale gives about 60-90fps
3. Kinoma running on OMAP tungsten gives number about 270+ fps

From this apparently a generalization is said that 133mhz omap really can compete with 800mhz Xscale. This is the first real world sample since TI's "we beats Xscale" on polygon drawing presentation.

now yes, there are tons of arguable steps
-Kinoma is not really a benchmark, and it doesn't act consistently across platfrom (literaly crash on Clie )
-Kinoma is still beta the one for Clie is not stable.
-Codec is proprietary. Nobody can tell how much difference in coding and output quality between Xscale vs OMAP.
-For best comparison maybe would be .mpeg. at exact same original file to be played.
-The number are very few and far in between to reliably say what is running how far.

but at any rate despite all this, my current suspicion

if the DSP in OMAP is utilized properly, it can propel some aspect of video player ability. I would not be surprise if there is going to be a player that can out perform 400mHz .mpeg player by about at least 150%.

Now this relies purely on hardware and application writing craftmanship I suppose, since OS 5.0 doesn't even seems stable enough to handle 3 hrs movie so far.

but nonetheless it starts to bring up the question is Xscale really such a low performer? (for certain type of application such as video playing)

.......this REALLY does not bode well for the ever so tedious 'which one is better PPC or Palm' internet brawl...!

multimedia is the one thing used so much to prove the strength of PPC in a comparison argument.

oh boy...this is going to be a long winter if Tungsten's .mpeg player will finally come out and spew higher quality video

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ref. (there are more across the net....)

http://discussion.brighthand.com/showthread.php?s=4c02406d7f5dd5984d7b82b91017b18d&threadid=63565&perpage=15&pagenumber=2

[Jason Dunn]

I know nothing about this Palm player, but if it's anything like other Palm video players I've seen, don't believe the hype. The Packet Video player I saw for the Handspring almost two years ago would only play every second line of the video! I think it was called "interleaving" or something, and they had to do that to keep the frame rate and quality of the video up. Problem is, it made the video look like you were watching it on an old TV from the 50's. Nasty!

Framerate isn't everything - what's the bit rate? I can do 6000 frames per second if the data contained in each frame is only 1 Kbps.

[Sheynk]

I agree with jason,

To be perfectly honest with you, I dont think that Palm will reach the multimedia level of Pocket PC at least till OS 6.0 (why you might ask). Because based on palms and palm lisencers, the divice multimedia performace is only about half of whats expected (but exactly whats promissed) could you watch a vid on the clie, yes but.....come on. Can you take pictures with clie, yes but the resolution

Now now, I know that my post might be rideculed over this, but I had experience with both platforms. Palm would be the choice for me if I could do the things it promissed. Sure Msft promisses alot of things, but my ipaq 3900 does everything that is promissed and I dont (thats right) suffer any slowdown compared to the 3800 (which I owned)

To be honest with you, the day that palm gets transcriber (or some form of it), gets rid of that graffity area completly, and becomes able to fuently play media files to their full potential, I will switch.

in conclusion, palm is on the rights way. smaller and faster is the right way to go for this company. Now all we have to do is wait for Sony to buy palm and create the ppc killer.....

[Steve Bush]

I feel some crow-eating coming soon. This reminds me of the infamous Thoughts predictions about Palm's demise by this fall, Bluetooth lack of adoption, and the "fake" iPAQ 5000 pictures. :wink:

[mookie123]

Well Bluetooth isn't exactly triving either. Once a/b/g combo start hitting the $100 price bracket. BT will be just oddity feature on high end phones. BT performance doesn't justify anybody to adopt more than a couple of odd ball devices.

BTW, Sprint starts to offer WiFi hot-spot data service with tied up to phone bill.

[Jason Dunn]

I feel some crow-eating coming soon. This reminds me of the infamous Thoughts predictions about Palm's demise by this fall, Bluetooth lack of adoption, and the "fake" iPAQ 5000 pictures. :wink:

Mr. Bush! Thanks for joining us here and for you "comments". :roll: I'm happy to eat crow when I'm wrong, but I fail to see how the things you mentioned above have any relavence here. I'd be happy to discuss my "errors" with you in private.

I read your article on the Palm event and the TI OMAP processor, and it may be that the TI processor is far more powerful than the Xscale (I'm really not impressed with the Xscale at all so far) - but I'm a little shocked at how easily you swallowed everything they fed you. Benchmarks are easy enough to cook up, and you expected a fair benchmark of a TI processor from a TI representative? Come on - I know you're more of a jaded journalist than that. Or were the Palm broadway singers really that good?

I'll wait for third party site to do some real comparison before making any conclusions.

[mookie123]

Speaking of processors benchmark, review and consistency.

I can't find anythng else on the net to back up the statement below. Even various other officials spec, reviews by PIC, infosync.no cannot reproduce the statement below.

"The T's rechargeable lithium ion battery should get the typical user about a week's worth of usage between charges. In our casual testing, we found that under identical processing patterns we achieved 1-2 more days of battery life from the Tungsten T than from a Compaq iPAQ 3970 Pocket PC. "

http://www.brighthand.com/article/Tungsten_T_review

all other number from various review and user posts swrils around 3-3.5 hrs. which is far below iPAQ 3970's 4.5hrs on continuous test.

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well, more than just ego battle, ultimately accurate independent measurement can help advance PDA performance, prodding big companies to improve, fix glitches, bad design and spec. discrapencies.

I hope brighthand can publish what they've done on the comparison test which result 1-2 days longer.

[marconelly]

I must say I'm *terribly* disappointed in the XScale performance. Somethin there is screwed up royally, and developers I've talked to agree. I asked a friend to do benchmarks with MAMECE3 emualtor on Ipaq 3970 and the FPS he was getting were about the same as the FPS I was getting on my Casio EM500 MIPS device!! That same Casio was so obviously slower than Ipaq 3650 running the same emulator that the only possible conclusion is that XScale chip, although running at twice the frequency, performas much slower than 206MHz StrongARM in a real life multimeda application.

It really goes like this according to this test:

StrongARM 206Mhz >> MIPS 180Mhz (overclocked) >= XScale 400Mhz.

I was utterly disappointed, but the numbers don't lie, and more experienced game developers have told me there is nothing that can be done about it they are aware of.