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Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine)Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine)Posted Jan 8, 2008 7:03 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine) by mtaht Parent article: Wistron Shows Google Android Phone (PC Magazine)
hardware development is faster then you imply while the speed may only have doubled in 10 years, the power requirements have dropped and the price has dropped even more drasticly. 10 years ago the 'high end' pda at 266MHz would set you back close to $1000 and you would be doing good to get one day's worth of use out of the batteries. today the 400MHz machine is ~300-400 (with quite a few more features added) and will last several days on a smaller (and therefor lighter) battery pack for me the big news of google getting involved in the mobile phone market isn't that it's new for linux to be involved, it's that they may have the money and name recognition to finally break the stranglehold that the powers-that-be have over the mobile phone market.
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Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine) Posted Jan 8, 2008 12:12 UTC (Tue) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link] Also, embedded device speed increase is more like 10x faster than that old 266Mhz PDA. I work on a (commercially available) 3.5G cellular device which contains 2 cores running at 1GHz. As dlang implies, the embedded space tends to work to different requirements, so we are much more likely to trade speed for better power consumption. This stands to reason: the processes we use are basically the same as the desktop chips (we may run one process generation behind), but we just run the chips at a different operating point (lower voltage, so lower frequency).
Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine) Posted Jan 9, 2008 0:39 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] And, Moore's law speaks about the number of transistors: at a given price, it will double every 18 months. It says nothing about processor speeds.I think it was a historical accident that processor speeds grew that fast in 1970-2000. In fact, the current generation of processors runs slower than the last (in Intel's i386 offerings), or roughly at the same speed (everyone else). It does not seem to be practical to go beyond 3 GHz, and yet transistor densities are still increasing at the predicted rate. Also in the embedded space, which means that the new processors can do much more in the same space (and with the same power). Speed is not the only factor.
Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine) Posted Jan 11, 2008 9:14 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] Intel's Core 2 Duo's run considerably faster than Pentium 4's, even with just one core - they have a similar clock speed but can get more work done per clock. Intel would not still be in business if its new processors were slower than the old ones, and in fact it is beating AMD at present.
Wistron Shows Montavista Phone (PC Magazine) Posted Jan 8, 2008 18:57 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] Costs for embedded chips has come down - still not anywhere near what Moore's law predicts. Speed has not gone up, anywhere near what Moore's law predicts. Power consumption is a major factor. Moore's law does apply to things like flash storage, I note - I have 8GB on my nokia n800.... I confess to being somewhat disappointed that we aren't seeing more embedded cpus using < 90 nanometer processes at this point. re: " for me the big news of google getting involved in the mobile phone market isn't that it's new for linux to be involved, it's that they may have the money and name recognition to finally break the stranglehold that the powers-that-be have over the mobile phone market." I certainly hope so! I remember the major disconnects we had in meeting after meeting with the major operators in this market... ...trying to get sensical things like treating voicemail as data, using rss and dropping the concept of WAP, supporting multiple toolkits and X, etc. They had NIH and revenue_per_call embedded completely in their every model, not what their customers wanted. I also particularly bitterly remember battling with TI to free up their omap compiler so normal people could actually use the DSP. Finally (as part of the openneuros project) - a free compiler is available for OMAP. It may be too little, too late, as vfp is quite nice and quite a bit easier to use. And my whole point to the posting was simply that the article was showing off (and praising) the Montavista stack, not android. The title was misleading....
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