Scribblings

For a long time people have become more aware of what is behind the scene of all those porn. I don’t mean it in the literal sense, but I meant what is inside your personal computer. And how ever meaningless the brandings are, people know which one is a dual core in a Core2Solo and Core2Duo. And we are also reasonably equipped to navigate the world of clock speeds. We know a 1.5GHz Atom processor is not better than a Cor2Duo 1.2GHz processor or at least you are expected to know or the very least have all the info in front of you to know what you are getting into. Try googling Core2Duo vs. Atom processor and you have about a million websites explaining the same.

This brings us to something I want to discuss today, Mobile Phones. Or mostly smart phones, now do you have any idea what is under the hood of an iPhone? The Palm Pre maybe? Nope? And I don’t blame you. Though Apple slaps a big 2X sticker on an iPhone 3GS they don’t tell you why or how. We are left to take their word for it, and as I have written before, yes it is indeed faster than the 3G. And what’s underneath is quite impressive too and Apple should be proud of it. Ok let me give you a background.

The processor widely used in most of the phones in market today is an ARM11 based processor. Before you raise your hand to object hear me out. ARM is a company which designs these processors, they then licenses it out to others like Samsung and Qualcom for manufacturing. These manufactures take the design and slap other units like Graphics and Radio processors on a single die (chip) and sell it to Mobile makers (Like HTC, Apple, Palm and so on). This in itself a marvel, imagine a CPU, a RAM, a Graphics processor and a Radio processor in a single chip not more than a finger nail. Top of it they are designed with Power and Heat restriction.

Now this ARM11 processor is designed way back in 2001. Why is it in all the phones today, even the ones costing about 600 to 800 dollars? Simple. They are cheap, and nobody cares. Now they have designed another processor more efficient and powerful, it’s called the ARM Cortex A8, Samsung makes one processor based on it and calls it Snapdragon (you might have heard of this in recent phones). To give you an idea, look at the chart below

Scratching your head? Let me explain. The important stat here is the Issue Width. In a 1-issue processor only 1 instruction can be worked upon in a single stage of the processor. Example, if a processor has 5 stages (fetch, decode, operands, execute, retire) then only one instruction can be in one stage at any one instance. So obviously 2-issue means 2 instructions can go down the pipe line. Where in increasing the output speed.

Now this is not the only difference, look at the L2 cache, even though it’s optional in ARM11 processor, none of the manufactures put it. But in Cortex A8, L2 is a must. I won’t go more in detail about these, but this much is clear the Cortex A8 processor is at the minimum 40% faster than the ARM11 and in real world, almost 200% faster.

Now, do you see the baring difference, even if HTC Diamond has 528 MHz processor it’s still a 1-issue processor and is always trumped by the 600 MHz Cortex A8 in a iPhone; even though it has only a marginally better clock speed. So it’s my opinion that Apple should be standing on a roof top, baring their teeth, thumping their chests and shouting what a great processor they have. But I have an idea why they are not doing so, if they did, my first question would be that; then why on the name of all that is holy, can’t the OS handle multiprocessing? I guess that’s how bloated their OS is.

I would like to see the manufactures put these details on the box, and we should be really looking for these when we are buying one. Common people, Steve Jobs called the iPod touch a mobile computer, a gaming device and everything else in between. Shouldn’t we be pissed off when that ‘Mobile Computer’ comes with a processor 10 years old?

If HTC or Sony or Apple would not tell you all this, I will. Below is the low down.

Mobile Phones with the ARM11 processor (the bad one)

The one with Cortex A8