Published in Mobiles

Mobile phone industry too slow for new hardware

by on30 November 2010
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Takes them year(s) to migrate
HTC HD2 was launched roughly a year ago. This was one of the first phones to have 1GHz Cortex A8 based processor. This version is now legendary Qualcomm Snapdragon, that even today it delivers great performance. As of today, there is not a single mobile phone with a chip that is significantly faster that Snapdragon, and faster chips are available.

At least one company, Nvidia had dual core ready roughly at the same time. We are sure that Qualcomm, Texas instruments and Samsung also have their own dual cores. The chip we all talk about for quarter,s and we still have to see the design and until today, the last day of November 2010 is of course Tegra 2. Nevertheless we haven’t seen any dual-core ARM A9 chips on the market.

There is a big hope that a few companies should at least announce their dual-core cortex A9 based products at the upcoming Mobile Word Congress, scheduled for February.

LG should be among first Tegra 2 phone supporters, shipping them shortly after announcement. At the same time, we expect an ARM A9 based dual-core in iPhone 5 should come out with a in late June 2011. Let's not forget Samsung Nexus S and Motorola should also have a dual-core phone.

The fun part is that at the time first dual-core ARM A9 phones touch the market, fabs should be taping out the A15 28nm / 32nm versions of next generation dual and quad core, and if all goes well by this time next year there should be some 28nm chips available.

The trouble is we don’t seeing mobile phone manufacturers being that fast to migrate. Intel / AMD notebook manufacturers have a new design SKU at least once a year and they are ready to launch simultaneously with a new CPU introduction. Intel will launch Sandy Bridge, or the new Core i 2000 series on January 5th and you will see notebooks available based on the new chips instantly.

This won't really happen that soon to mobile phone industry as mobile phone hardware lags at least a year after a next gen CPU gets available.

Another thing is that Google’s Android or iPhone OS were probably not ready to tame two cores.


Last modified on 01 December 2010
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