Tuesday, February 15, 2011

ARM - who does what Samsung (8)

Samsung is a specialist ARM SoC. The company team because some of its phones with its own chips (the Hummingbird is quite famous) but also the team of Apple phones since the beginning. The Samsung SoC are the usual S5L8900 the APL0298C05 S5PC111 and even if Apple A4 is also considered by some as a Samsung, because the Korean firm has worked with Apple for its design.

The first was used in first generation iPhone, the second in the iPhone 3G? the latest in Tablet Tab and smartphones Galaxy and Galaxy Nexus S. S5L8900 the team is the SoC that the first generation iPhone and iPod touch. 90 nm in the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod touch 1G, it is clocked at 412 MHz.

In the 2G iPod touch, there is a 65 nm and reaches 533 MHz. This chip has an ARM11 CPU fairly standard (original ARM, ARM1176 a), a GPU PowerVR MBX Lite can calculate 3.4 million dragging / s with a 270-megapixel fillrate / s and a basic decoding chip for video. For the CPU, the two share the same chip SoC: a Cortex A8.

It is a core architecture ARMv7, with a pipeline of 13 stages and manages the instructions sequentially (In Order). The FPU is pretty average (that of the Cortex A9 is more efficient) but the majority of implementations - including those from Samsung - integrate the SIMD instruction set Neon.

The first Cortex A8 SoC uses a 600 MHz, the second reached 1 GHz. Samsung uses the same part in both its graphic chips: PowerVR SGX GPU. The APL0298C05 SGX535 is based on the Hummingbird on SGX540, faster. Both chips are based on the same architecture, but SGX540 is faster: it increased from two to four units USSE but keep two rendering pipelines.

Power changes accordingly: 20 million triangles / s and 1 Gigapixel / s fillrate, against 14 million triangles / s and (always) 1 gigapixels / s SGX535. the chip is supported by a VXD37x of Technology at Imagination for decoding video, a chip that can decode 1080p H.264. Samsung has its own factories and is capable of burning with current technologies.

If APL0298C05 is a 65 nm - which explains the frequency of only 600 MHz - the Hummingbird is 45nm. I / Tthe fairly conventional, with management of the USB flash memory, etc.. For memory bandwidth, the first SoC works in 32 bits on a single channel, the Hummingbird is working on two channels, an equivalent 64-bit, which improves performance a bit.

The future Samsung is OrionExynos a SoC with two cores at 1 GHz, a priori Cortex A9. There is not much information on this chip.

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