$89 buys a quad core A-9 with Ubuntu support ....  complete with heat sink style extruded case

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G1353413...













Man oh man, they are getting closer and closer to my "double up"  goal numbers ..... and these guys talk "overclocking" too.

 
From what I remember, multi-core counts 1 for the first cpu plus 1/2 for the second and the rest don't count at all unless you have a game or an app that uses all 4 cores effectively to the max (and nothing ever does).

So this thing is effectively a 2.5 gigahertz machine   (1.7 plus .85) with 2 gig of systems memory with a Mali 400 4 core gpu.   Video is not so hot for now-a-days, got some better stuff out there already.

So, this is the first "double up" machine to my white box at home.    and it does look good too, sitting in that significant heat sink that it doesn't really need unless you are overclocking it and mashing it hard.


Now the Allwinner A40 will swing 4 A-7 cores at 1.2 gigahertz (1.8 total) with 2 gig of systems memory and a Mali 658 8 core graphics system.  It will cost like $50 after it is out a while.

I am sure Hardcore is going to do all the Samsung chips in series as they roll out so there is a dual and quad core A15 out there in the future (which will kick some serious ass inside the next year at 2.2 + 1.1 = 3.3 gigahertz with an 8 core Mali 658 system on the quad core A-15.

Oddly enough, this quad core A-9 rig up will run hotter than any of the future ones as it is an older larger 32nm lithography set up.

The newer chips which come after this will come in at 28nm and 20nm and be physically much smaller and run a lot cooler to boot.

Having met the "double up" requirements and seeing "triple up" becoming available inside the upcoming year, I am content to wait and continue watching the explosion of new goodies.

You are not the only one reporting lacks on the software side -- most litle box forums are rife with teething issues on the software side, which they are patching as fast as they can with custom patches (but they are patching things that should be done in the kernel, which slows the device down accordingly).

Linus is complaining about ARM being too disjointed with "nobody in charge" and Linaro is trying to step into that gap by offering tool chain kits BEFORE the various SOC chips designed and released.   Linus is tell the chip dudes to use the tool chain tools and stock drivers, or provide a fully tested driver set up front if you want into the kernel.

The marketplace is also showing a strong preference for "conforming" chipsets like the Allwinner chipsets, which stick strictly to the Linaro tool chain models (and also make it to market quicker and cheaper for having done so).

Kernel 3.7.7 will open up some of the flood gates to these type of devices.  And I am expecting somebody other than Ubuntu to start putting out some dedicated distros designed exactly and specifically for the little ARM chipsets boxes.

http://liliputing.com/2012/12/chip-updates-new-processors-for-tablets-phones-...

Chip announcement time !!!

The rumors begin to get real part numbers and proposed ship dates.

Allwinner quad core A-7 is going to be called the Allwinner A31.   And this is going to be a low end chip for next year's cell phone & tablet horse races ....

Samsung Exynos 5440 quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 chip is going to be the best highest level candidate for "3x up on my home PC in a little bitty format".

We are still waiting for details on the graphics cores to be released, but first info is that everyone wants to be able to provide "retinal displays" so look for the Mali 400 go go away and the new Mali numbers to start with 6xx designations.

retina display?

do you poke yerself in the eye to select stuff?  

"You can't always believe what you read" category

"The overall performance is 2 times faster as that of the Quad Core Tegra 3,  1.5 times faster than iPad 2,and rival that of the New iPad."


No less than 5 additional Chinese tablet makers have outed their Allwinner A31 "APPLE like" 9.7 inch tablets.   Why the exact same screen size as APPLE?   The manufacturers who supplied APPLE are the only ones making a "retina" quality display screen.  

These Chinese folks are claiming "better performance" than the IPad3 on display and battery life.  

NOT REAL, these claims -- 85-90% as good, OK we could accept that but Better ???  Naw, APPLE ain't that easy.   But we can see Google and Amazon and Barnes & Noble sucking dust as of today.

However, now you can see the monkey gun in motion.  APPLE has to rush their A57 quad core equivalent into production ASAP or the faster to market Chinese using hard macro A53 designs straight from ARM are going to deny them their 1 year advantage just about completely.

Look for APPLE to come out with a new killer diller processor in the spring, but also look for the gap to narrow between APPLE and the cheap Chinese competition.  Also look for some of the slower competitors to do a Texas Instrument move and "leave the market" as they simply can't keep up with this crazy insane pace.  

Plus, the cheap stuff from China just lapped them again ....  that's gotta hurt.  In this market, that means low to no sales on all your stock on hand as Android press and people KNOW what is hot and what is not.  And you drop all efforts on anything that will not be competitive, right now you drop it.

And on top of this, Allwinner and the rest are already working on their multi core A53 chipsets (the chip are similar which will make it easy to do IF 20 nanometer production lines are built quickly in China as well).

===========

Crazy stuff continues on the A31 saga -- 5 Chinese phones are out using the same quad core chip.  What in the world is a phone going to do with all that horsepower?  

Answer is simple, the chip can autoscale all the way back to just one (1) A7 core running at its lowest idle speed just to keep the background emails and messages and tweets running.  It can instantly and seamlessly scale up through that core's speed range and each of the remaining cores speed range as needed to handle the workload.   The phones will be seamlessly FAST and will last a longer time between charges.

The A7 chip was built from the ground up to be the most energy efficient chip ARM has ever built.  Phones were supposed to use a single big little with one A7 and one A15 for phones, but the Chinese caught on to a trick, four A7s can do anything a single core each big little can do at similar to better energy cost, so why go there at all?  

Plus, the quad core A7 is cheaper to make and takes up less real estate on the lithography wafer than a single A15 does and it has much higher production yields as well.  The A15 core is much more complex and it by itself carries a scrap penalty that is much higher than a whole quad core A7 SOC would carry.

Fair warning, this Chinese production/energy trick didn't go past ARM unnoticed.  The new A53 64 bit chipsets at 20 nanometer have hard macro designs starting at 4 and going up to 8 cores.

If Allwinner comes flying out of the gate with an 8 core A53 with next gen above retina graphics MID NEXT YEAR, the slower guys like Qualcom and Broadcom might well toss in their towels.  

The cheapest of the cheap are nipping at the heels of APPLE and leaving no room for the rest of the pack.

Software in Android and in Linux needs to get much better at using multiple cores past the first two.

Quad core is going to be dirt common in the future and a lot of games and stuff now are barely recognizing and using a dual core set-up anywhere near effectively.   Better, more modern software will be required in the future.

Android and Linux deal with two different code masses, really.  

Mainstream Linux has been 64 bit  and multi-core for quite a while, so the 64 bit stuff will be fine when we get there next year.   Problem is we are currently having to run the "old 32 bit versions" of Linux on the existing 32 bit ARM stuff that is available now and one of the precepts of "old 32 bit versions" of Linux is that it was intentionally written for older single core processors.

So, Linux will ramp up next year just fine to multi-tread, multi-core and 64 bit as it will be rejoining the main stream of things (even have a supporting 64 bit kernel with drivers and all).   It won't be flaw free, a changeover never is.  Lots of things will hit bug lists and get fixed inside of 6 months or so.  

Older Linux programs will still have been aimed at single thread execution as after all, they are older programs.   Lots of old stuff in Linux though, old code that works well doesn't get scrapped, it gets reused.  Linux is full of older code -- it works, so they don't mess with it just for the jollies of it.

Android however will be have to be re-released in a 64 bit supporting dessert flavor that will have practically NO software out there in the Play Store that is written for 64 bit or multi-core.  And all the older Android games were all built in a 32 bit single processor single threaded world.

So, if I were faced with a high clock speed dual core A57 that sucked some juice vs a more efficient quad or octa core A53, either of which tested out within 10% of each other, I'd be better off to go with the fewer faster cores (at a higher price, cost and energy use) because the existing software mass can handle dual cores a lot better than it can a quad core.  

Octa core?  Really now, they will never get off idle if they are load-spreading across 8 cores and that is if they can get all 8 of the cores to light up using the single stream of 32 bit RISC instructions coming from the software.

Now, Linaro and ARM are aware of and are working on this issue, trying to get the core management system to show the software a multi core processor as if it were a large fast single core system.  Good luck with that, you are just load-spreading instead of multi-treading and we all remember how well that worked in the x86 world when that issue was current.  

You would be a lot smarter to set up the 64 bit system to dual execute 32 bit instructions on each core flawlessly as that is what all Android software is, a string of fast 32 bit RISC instructions.  However, you just 2x'd your functional core count which made the core issue worse, not better.  It is a puzzlement, no?


===============


Now the good news.  32 bit RISC instructions execute quickly and they can be split up between cores efficiently if the system is really set up that way.  So Android and Linux code will still remain much faster than X86 code even if the 64 bit changeover is fraught with old software, etc. etc.   The code is much smaller and lighter (and generally speaking better written).

And the new generation processors are so much faster that folks will see NOTICEABLE speed increases and new snappy smooth performance out of these new devices.



And if you can Stephen Hawing eyeball your screen to move the cursor and talk to your machine as well as touch the screen and type on the keyboard and click your mouse, boy, just think how much more exercise you are going to get.  

The kids a year or so from now will sit in class with their phones in their laps just a twitching and blinking and mumbling to themselves -- a regular epileptic twitchy generation.

 
77 cores, coming in 2013,  Tegra 4 Wayne A15 chip

Got to rush "the big gun"  to market, as it only has 6-8 months before it gets washed away by the 64 bit stuff .....





The Wayne processor is said to feature 4-plus-1 processor cores, much like the NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. That means it’s basically a quad-core chip with an extra low-power companion core which kicks in for basic, low-level functions.

What’s new is the graphics area of the chip, which will reportedly have 72 cores and offer 6 times the performance of Tegra 3, and 20 times the performance of a Tegra 2 chip.