News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-processor. Parent comment

Re:Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-proc... by bitmapbrother on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @05:41PM (#15503438)
Why not also blame Samsung for their Exynos or Huawei for their Kirin? Do you know what all 3 of these 3 SoC's have in common? They all use the same reference design developed by ARM. None of these SoC makers are going to spend the additional billions in SoC R&D deviating from the ARM design. If you really want to see a change then it must begin with ARM.

>Qualcomm doesn't really seem capable of keeping up with what Apple is doing. Snapdragon 835 came out 6 months after the A10, and scored about 2/3 as well at single core, and less than 10% on Geekbench 4. A11 scored twice what the 835 did on single core, and over 50% more on multi core, and the 835 is going to be the best chip available in the U.S. for Android until sometime next year.

Qualcomm and Apple are on different release cycles. The SD 845 will be in the same ballpark in multicore score and about 25% slower in single core than the A11.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixel Visual Core: Google’s first custom-designed co-proc... by jrs95 on Thursday October 19, 2017 @12:15PM (#15509193)
You could blame them as well, it's just a lot less relevant to the U.S. smartphone market (where iPhone has the highest market share AFAIK) since everyone is on Snapdragon here.

As for Qualcomm and Apple being on different release cycles...that's exactly the problem! They're 6 months behind AND still have worse performance, plus due to their deal with Samsung, it's going to take even longer than that for any other manufacturers to ship devices with 845.

As another comment said, it's not really going to be profitable for any company to try and compete with Apple on this. Which is why if it is going to happen, it's going to have to be done by someone like Google who has a vested interest in it beyond profitability from the chips themselves. If ARM reference designs can't keep up with what Apple is doing, and nobody else is willing to invest to go beyond them, Android will fall behind in the high end of the market.

[ Parent | on HN ]