Snapdragon dreams
I'm very curious how well Qualcomm's new Snapdragon processors will do over the next year.
Qualcomm is looking to break out of the wireless phone market into the laptop/netbook market.
Instead of making big, expensive, power-hungry processors smaller like Intel's move downwards from desktop to laptop/netbook with their Atom, Qualcomm is using their expertise with the small, cheap, low-power cell phone processors to push upwards into laptop applications.
The dominant processor in mobile phones and other handheld electronics are ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors. Snapdragon is a core design licensed from ARM which Qualcomm adds graphics/mobile broadband/GPS into the chip itself.
ARM processors are low-power due to their RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) design, which uses half the transistors of Intel's current x86 design since they don't use microcode. The difference between Intel's current laptops using CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) chips and ARM's RISC chips is the difference between having a long list on instructions ("...If this happens, do this. If that happens, do this other thing....") that is flexible but you use the whole list for everything (CISC) or having a small list of simple commands which handle routine needs quicker and are pieced together when more complexity is needed (this would be like having only one command, addition, so something more complex like multiplication would be stacked as addition with extra steps; 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 instead of 2 x 4) in RISC.
These differences mean that regular Windows does not run on ARM processors, so the upcoming Linux-powered Snapdragon smartbooks won't be as easy to replace with Windows as the current netbooks. If Ubuntu or some other distro works to make the software solid, then this could open the door wider for Linux in the mainstream and lead to greater competition for Intel and Windows.
Right now, Snapdragons are only in phones like the TG01 but improved smartbook versions will be out by next year. They'll include 45nm Dual CPUs up to 1.5 GHz, higher-resolution WSXGA (1440 x 900) display with multiple video codec support, high-definition (1080p) video recording and playback, mobile broadband support (HSPA+ 28 Mbps downloads and 11 Mbps uploads), mobile broadcast TV, 12-megapixel camera support, GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth support and improved 3D graphics with up to 80M triangles/sec and 500M+ 3D pixels/sec (read that is better than the Wii; how much more I'm not sure, although all three major game consoles use RISC chips).
I was reading that Snapdragons are cheaper to make than Atoms, but I can't find that right now either.
I hope they really catch on next year.
Qualcomm is looking to break out of the wireless phone market into the laptop/netbook market.
Instead of making big, expensive, power-hungry processors smaller like Intel's move downwards from desktop to laptop/netbook with their Atom, Qualcomm is using their expertise with the small, cheap, low-power cell phone processors to push upwards into laptop applications.
The dominant processor in mobile phones and other handheld electronics are ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors. Snapdragon is a core design licensed from ARM which Qualcomm adds graphics/mobile broadband/GPS into the chip itself.
ARM processors are low-power due to their RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) design, which uses half the transistors of Intel's current x86 design since they don't use microcode. The difference between Intel's current laptops using CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) chips and ARM's RISC chips is the difference between having a long list on instructions ("...If this happens, do this. If that happens, do this other thing....") that is flexible but you use the whole list for everything (CISC) or having a small list of simple commands which handle routine needs quicker and are pieced together when more complexity is needed (this would be like having only one command, addition, so something more complex like multiplication would be stacked as addition with extra steps; 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 instead of 2 x 4) in RISC.
These differences mean that regular Windows does not run on ARM processors, so the upcoming Linux-powered Snapdragon smartbooks won't be as easy to replace with Windows as the current netbooks. If Ubuntu or some other distro works to make the software solid, then this could open the door wider for Linux in the mainstream and lead to greater competition for Intel and Windows.
Right now, Snapdragons are only in phones like the TG01 but improved smartbook versions will be out by next year. They'll include 45nm Dual CPUs up to 1.5 GHz, higher-resolution WSXGA (1440 x 900) display with multiple video codec support, high-definition (1080p) video recording and playback, mobile broadband support (HSPA+ 28 Mbps downloads and 11 Mbps uploads), mobile broadcast TV, 12-megapixel camera support, GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth support and improved 3D graphics with up to 80M triangles/sec and 500M+ 3D pixels/sec (read that is better than the Wii; how much more I'm not sure, although all three major game consoles use RISC chips).
I was reading that Snapdragons are cheaper to make than Atoms, but I can't find that right now either.
I hope they really catch on next year.