Posts by Zola

Re: Headline is wrong

Why would nokia go for android ?

There's only one reason Nokia sold their phone business to Microsoft - because they couldn't make money from it while running Windows Phone. If Nokia believed their Devices & Services business had a future with Windows Phone, they wouldn't have sold it - it's really that simple. Nokia stopped believing in Windows Phone, or realised they would run out of money before it was once again a viable business, and had to get out. Presumably their 2011 deal with Microsoft precludes them from launching an Android phone at this point in time.

What is now more interesting is that Nokia and Microsoft have completely different business goals until this deal completes in ~6 months time. Nokia are basically losing money on every device sale as Elop chased market share with deep volume discounts and low ASPs, but now that Nokia are about to offload the D&S business they must surely be looking to protect what cash they have in the bank, which should mean eliminating discounts, raising ASP, and NOT chasing market share - exactly what Microsoft will not want.

In fact, Microsoft will want Nokia to lose as much money as possible over the next 6 months. What will Nokia do? Unless Microsoft are willing to cover Nokia's losses, Nokia should now sell only the low volume high-end, high margin Lumia stuff.

Re: "strength continues to lie in its cheaper models"

Nokia need to get out of the budget smartphone market where they are losing money on every sale (negative 3% margin according to most recent financials, and likely to increase as the ASP sinks lower) unless they can start shipping MediaTek or Rockchip based hardware.

Relying on relatively expensive Qualcomm gear to stuff into your budget Lumias is commercial suicide. Of course this requires that Microsoft introduce platform diversity, and since this doesn't seem likely any time soon it leaves Nokia up a creek without a paddle.

Re: "Dumb" until Qualcomm are able to produce an 8 core chip

Uh, why?

My Core i7 desktop computer "only" has 4 cores and my laptop "only" has 2 cores, and both work great.

Not if it has hyper-threading and presents 8 cores to the OS....

But that's beside the point, your 4 (real) i7 cores are significantly more powerful than the ARM cores in mobile SoCs, so having more cores in the mobile SoCs isn't a bad thing.

Of course we'd all like mobile SoCs to have cores as powerful as i7 cores but that's just impractical given current technology. Therefore the best approach is increased parallelism, and more cores (some big, some little) which gives finer grained power control when such control is required (ie. while mobile and on battery power).

No. A low-performance CPU will use much less power than a high-performance CPU running at a lower clock speed.

And equally, a high-performance core may use less power than a lower performance core, simply because it can complete the task more quickly.

It's the race to idle, the more quickly you can finish a task (and switch off the core) the less power you use overall. So a task that runs for 2 minutes (potentially maxed out) on a low performance core but only 30 seconds on a higher performance core may actually use the same or even less power on that higher performance core.

Re: I agree. 8 core phones are pretty dumb.

So what are the 8 cores for? That one time when you want to revisit the 90s and draw a mandelbrot?

No, it's for when I drop my Smartphone into a mains powered dock and start running a full desktop OS. With all 8 cores going gangbusters on whatever tasks I'm performing on my full desktop OS.

Try not to think about the limited smartphones of today, which are running operating systems that massively lag the prodigious hardware they have available to them.

Some firms (eg. Ubuntu) have embraced the "hybrid" approach and it's quite compelling, while potentially disruptive for an already ailing PC hardware industry. It remains to be seen if the other mobile OS vendors with fingers in the PC/desktop OS pie, ie. Apple and Microsoft, will ever follow the lead of Ubuntu - due to conflicts of interest I find that incredibly unlikely, so it's just as well I have no interest in what they do.

According to the video on their site they are 8 equal cores and they have the ability to switch on or off as many as needed for the task at hand.

Assuming you are talking about the MediaTek True Octa-Core, the video, nor any of the documentation, fails to make it clear if it's using equal cores or not - MediaTek don't even mention the architecture (Cortex-A7, A12, A15 etc.) of the ARM cores in any of their documentation.

However the "Optimized ARM big.LITTLE" tab at the top of the MediaTek True Octa-Core page gives the game away - the MediaTek True Octa-Core is using big.LITTLE MP, which would only be the case if all 8 cores were NOT equal. Most likely there are 4xA7 and 4xA15 cores, but with big.LITTLE MP all of the 8 cores can be in use at any one time.

It's also funny how they absolutely cane their competitor (Samsung) by pointing out their ability to support only Cluster Migration and not CPU Migration (as we now know, thanks to the broken CCI -400 in the Exynos 5410). Perhaps MediaTek will need to revise their marketing material once the 5420 comes to market, assuming the CCI-400 is fixed of course...

And with a fully functional CCI-400, the Exynos 5420 should also be able to support big.LITTLE MP, just like the MediaTek True Octa-Core, as this is mostly a kernel/driver software thing with Linux support arriving only in the last few months. No doubt Android will gain big.LITTLE MP support in due course, although it's not going to be of much use to those poor international Galaxy S4/Exynos 5410 users.