"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).
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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.