The Orient is going smart phone crazy right now. So is Brazil and India and Indochina. The Orient does not have 4G LTE they have older style simpler slower cell phone systems. Oriental cell phones tend to be very modest by American or European standards, almost 3 years back in features and technology.
But they will sell more of these "beginner Android phones" in the next few years than all the superphones in America or Europe added together. By a factor of 3-4 times. This is a big big big huge business -- well worth being at the center of and investing all sorts of time and effort into.
Firefox and Mediatek are forming up a functional phone group right now that is dirt cheap and actually not all that bad. These cell phones will show up here in Verizon stores this fall, as starter phones for kids or "feature phones" if you will. Go take a look at one when they get here, they are actually pretty clever and the battery will last for days and days instead of just the part of one day that a superphone currently gets on a charge.
No, they don't do everything an Android phone can do. No, the app store is still sparse and most things are done on line using web sites for the horsepower. The good news is they are FAST and since a lot of the work is being done on line, the battery lasts and lasts.
Quad core Allwinner A-7 and quad core Mediatek A-7 are the oriental chips of choice in this new expansion zone.
Watch Allwinner and Mediatek duke it out for chip sales in this hotly contested but HUGE low end market. Allwinner is going to drop the very fancy VR chipset out of their quad core systems and go with quad core Mali. Ditto for Mediatek, they don't need the ritz VR chipsets any more because the low end tablet market is now going to Rockchip RK3199 with quad core Mali graphics for the improved raw power it represents (and the better price on the chips doesn't hurt, either).
These guys are going to go traipsing off into the octa core A7 and octa core A53 landscape before long
and if they stick with stock Mali quad core GPUs we will likely have some appreciably quite quick, powerful and very energy conscious Linux-ready chipsets out there in a year or so to go into hobby boards and mini-supercomputers and all sorts tv boxes and little Ubuntu computers.
Demand for Chinese phones is so great entire ARM foundaries are being built (in China for the Chinese, Taiwan for everybody else) and run at full speed to make enough chips. These newest ones are 18-20nm plants.
MIPSAlso look for MIPS China as a "People's National Industry" to try again with their own totally owned MIPS production system to make a chip that meets Chinese needs. Pack you up a not quite worn out 28nm line, take you an old MIPS mainframe chip design, the Godson-2, and die shrink it from 185nm down to 28nm and suddenly it rocks again -- significant speed and throughput at very slight energy usage -- plus there is a world of software that will run on it box stock (including versions of Linux and Android). It is still has a larger footprint compared to modern ARM chipsets, but it plays in the same ball park energy and power-wise (just way out in left field).
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The old Godson-2 (8 core) MIPS chips now at 28nm -- that hits my sense of appropriately ironic, actually. Alias the very best of the 185nm Sun Spark Workstation chipset family .... my my my that brings back some memories.
Bad assed CAD workstation chipsets in other words.
Remember 5-6 years ago when Chinese National Industry MIPS chips were at one time a strong competitor to the A8 single core ARM chipsets? Do you remember that period any? Little bitty flimsy plastic $69.00 7" netbooks on Ebay running Android? Sure you do. Drugstores would sell them in bubble packs to give to the kids to play with.
That was the Loongson MIPS chipset, a single core MIPS chipset at 135nm. Not much of a chipset, but neither was the A8 at the time either.
What you may have forgotten is that MIPS was actually invented at Stanford University and RISC was invented at Berkley back in the early 1980's and they duked it out in the very first small mainframe computers to see who would win. Both had adherents and both were victorious for short periods of time until IBM and Microsoft changed the game with CISC computing and the Personal Computer. Sun carried on with MIPS for a long time in their workstation business, as did Steve Jobs in his NEXT computer system.
MIPS were the premium power user chipsets back when Intel was a puppy and DOS still fit on a single floppy, right on up through Windows 3.1 era.
China bought MIPS from MIPS, Inc for a song years & years after MIPS went bankrupt and some of what they bought were the old historical designs for EMP hardened MIPS chipsets that were developed for the US Miltary during the cold war. MIPS could be EMP hardened much easier than CISC chips while RISC was then currently ACORN based out of England back then so it wasn't available to be directed down that military pathway.
China's military still 100% uses domestically designed and produced EMP hardened MIPS chipsets in all their military applications. They will always keep MIPS rolling along in China by Central Committee decree. Meanwhile the USA is still producing USA Intel and USA RISC chips for our military uses in our own secure facilities.
China and the USA military still get into each others shorts all the time electronically, and mebbe you can remember Bill Gates having to go to China to answer questions about "back doors" found in the Windows XP operating system that allowed the US to spy on the Chinese using intentional security holes in Intel chipsets and the Windows Explorer browser system .....
China bought the dead shell of MIPS, Inc for a song shortly after Gates visit. They had been making their own version of hardened MIPS military chips for years and years at that time illegally, so buying MIPS was a legalization effort for something they were already doing. How did they get the tech for EMP hardened MIPS chips originally? Espionage. The Chinese are very good spies. I dare say they bought some old lithography lines from Silicon Valley through third parties back in the day too.
If you see MIPS chips make any sort of comeback in phones or tablets, it should make your sense of wonder tingle a bit. Stanford University's brainchild coming home again, a full loop 30+ years later, a SUN Spark 8 core workstation chipset having been shrunk from 185nm down to 28nm by the power of cell phone technology.
And I bet each & every one of them has a back door somewhere in them so the Chinese can spy on us ..... yup, jest returning the Bill Gates favor after all these years.