http://liliputing.com/2013/09/allwinner-unveils-allwinner-a80-octa-processor....



Ringing the Octa core gong ..... Allwinner, with their mysterious A80 which may (or may not be) some NEW mixture of bigs and littles using heterogenous all at once ARM task allocation and the new undumpable rapid acting buffer system.

Allwinner is tight mouthed and generally fast on shipping the chips after an announcement -- they announce just about the time when they actually put out a real customer's product with the new chip in it, too.

Samsung had better be shipping their new Exynos 5420 Octa core, the one that really really works really really soon, or else Allwinner and Mediatek will both be painting on them with yellow "caution, slow traffic" paint.

Allwinner hasn't said what cores, how many of each cores OR what GPU will be used.  They are holding back some sort of "shocker" effect when the chip hits product and blasts out on to the scene in all its mysterious glory.

Early Allwinner chip generations were stock ARM/Mali processors, which weren't up to "Retina" screen resolutions when the A31 came out (Allwinner went with a VR GPU on that one chipset) but this time around Allwinner maybe/could be well served with a Mali 628 GPU as it can do the 4k resolution that is the current screen lovers post Retina display buzzword.  The Mali 628 (or 728 if you do the big boy) will also do calculation sharing and have all sorts of augmented 3D potentials & great I/O tricks if you stick with a stock ARM hard macro design package.

We miss the original A10 that Allwinner did -- it had every sort of I/O on it and the stock Mali graphics processor made for an open source product chipset that folks still remember fondly.   Rockchip tends to strip off I/O and other capabilities down to just whatever a tablet needs, which saves them a fractional penny a shot but not having intergated SATA or VGA available on the chipset costs them badly in the mini-board market later on.

These new chipsets need to have all the stock sorts of I/Os on them if they are going to go into little PC boxes, hobby boards, embedded uses, etc.   These higher power octa core chips will move into all sorts of car/kitchen/signage/embedded niches fairly quickly if they have the good I/Os to do it with.

We will see what this brand new A80 Octa core comes out as -- just in time for Halloween no less !!   Likely a right HIGH EFFICENCY MONSTER of a chipset, to be sure ....

   Apple has gotten their short moment of 64 bit glory, now here come all the little chinese cheapie guys to lap them from behind with better/faster/more efficient chipsets.

It will likely be right tough to be Apple next year, coming up from BEHIND at least 2-3 chinese cheapie guys and Samsung on chip power.  

All these announcements are going to make Samsung come out even HOTTER & HARDER when they push out their "unspecified but announced" top end 64 bit octa core design.   They will have to go big or go home, or else Apple's "mediocre" slam job on them will begin to smell more & more real.  

They certainly have to out-do the cheapie guys or else it will be real fer real .....    

Remember, 4&4 is passe out there in 64 bit ARM land ....  6 littles and 2 bigs might be Allwinner energy efficent mixture and 6 bigs and 2 littles might be the Samsung "Apple ass busting" perscription.  And also please remember, the A12 medium chipset is now available to put into this mix pattern, so you could do a big/medium little mix or any other mix combo you want for whatever product need you are aiming the chip at.

Allwinner and Rockchip will duke it out with each other yet again, with Rockchip swinging an A12 quad core 64 bit club while Allwinner will be swinging an Octa core club (cores not yet specified).  Remember, any club blows that hit Samsung or Apple are strictly incidental from these two not so little guys.  Broken bones and squishy Apple sauce resulting from this not so little guy nasty grudge match may wind up being of some considerable collateral damage to Apple by the end of next year.  

Apple is losing market share year on year as they fall further & further behind.  Innovative NEW products is what moves Apple forward, sitting still in place is what costs them.

Allwinner and Rockchip will always have their eyes on each other as they manoevre and fight over the 50 Billions of chips that is currently at stake in the Chinese market that they both serve.   And don't forget Mediatek, they haven't announced a 64 bit chipset yet either ....

   I need to remember to quit calling them "the little chinese cheapie guys" because they are actually bigger than AMD and Freescale now-a-days.

BTW, Nvidia and Qualcomm both need to get out a bigger club for next year .... what you got on deck right now isn't gonna cut it.

Weeeeeeeeeee !!    Smack down in phone/tablet land again !!!    


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Apple, your firing Samsung has freed up critical production space at the 16/20nm level and the little cheapie guys are game to go in there to dilute your profit margins even more.   Apple will mebbe actually be driven into Intel's arms as it is the Jobless Apple who can't design a significant new ARM chipset fast enough to stay significantly ahead any more.

And Samsung is sitting there grinning at you, because YOU are the one who is going to get considered "mediocre design-wise" when everyone (including the chinese cheapie guys) can out-perform your brand spanking new dual core 64 bit chipset.   (a dual core ???)

And Intel may not be able to save you year after next, as having to go back to Intel for a quad core chipset may mean you go back to a larger die square, slightly LESS THAN energy efficent x86 chipset.  

And Intel will be happy to charge you more for it, too.