Another article has been posted about how Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform is ideal for low cost, long battery life, small form factor notebook PCs. We heard about this a few weeks ago but Brooke Crothers of CNet visited Qualcomm to hear more detail about what’s going on. The article gives me a chance to dive into the details and give some thought about what’s happening here in both technology and market terms. Is it significant or not?

First of all a little background about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Its a small-form-factor, mobile computing platform (think of it as a ready-to-use computer on a tiny motherboard a bit like the image you see below-right.) that includes a CPU core which is based on a licensed ARMv7 architecture. ARMV7 is the architecture used in the ARM A8 Cortex CPU design that you can now find in the new Archos devices, the Open Pandora and BeagleBoard (image below-right) projects. Snapdragon has been a four year, $350 million project. It’s not clear how many snapdragon versions there are but the one that CNet are talking about is the new dual-core QSD8672 capable of clock speeds up to 1.5Ghz. The platform also includes the following features: (Details from Qualcomm.)

• WWAN, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity
• Seventh-generation gpsOne® engine for Standalone-GPS and Assisted-GPS modes, as well as gpsOneXTRA^TM Assistance 
• High definition video decode (720P)
• 3D graphics with up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec
• High resolution XGA display support
• 12-megapixel camera
• Support for multiple video codecs
• Audio codecs: (AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, FR, EFR, HR, WB-AMR, G.729a, G.711 , AAC stereo encode)
• Support for Broadcast TV (MediaFLO^TM , DVB-H and ISDB-T)
• Fully tested, highly-integrated solution including baseband, software, RF, PMIC, Bluetooth, Broadcast & Wi-Fi

Looking at the article from CNet, these tech specs might be referring to a previous Snapdragon platform because the CNet article mentions 1080p video and an ATI graphics core.

As JKKMobile pointed out , one of the important things to note about this platform is its inability to run Windows desktop software meaning that it’s restricted to mainly Linux-based distributions or WindowsCE-based operating systems but lets take a look at a few other aspects of the platform first.

Performance

According to some references on the Internet that I’ve been able to cross-check, raw single-core CPU performance of the platform, an important factor in rendering browser-based pages and applications, is in the order of 2000 Dhrystone MIPS at 1Ghz. Obviously a dual-core version, clocked at 1.5Ghz means we’re in the region of 3000-5000 MIPS which means, if you take a look around for Dhrystone tests on the Atom N270 used in netbooks, its right in the same ballpark. The N270 appears to return about 4000 Dhrystone MIPS. These figures don’t indicate anything about the real-world performance but they do tell us that, given good memory and storage performance the results are good enough to run a basic desktop OS.

Power Efficiency

This is something I think we should be careful to remain realistic about. While ARM cores are extremely efficient and idle at extremely low levels, we’re at the point where CPU power usage on Atom and ARM-architecture CPUs aren’t a world apart from each other. When taken as a ratio of total system power drain, including screen, radios, DC-DC components and storage, the CPU is well under 50% of the equation. In 10" screen devices, it’s even less. 20% maybe. The major power advantage here is gained through on-board integration. Packing processing cores, communications silicon and memory tightly together, unifying the power-saving methodology across the board and writing efficient firmware is they key. Qualcomm have a lot of experience in that and I expect to see well-designed Snapdragon-based netbooks in 2009 to be running in the order of 5W  about half the power that an N270-based notebook will use. Due to the high level of integration, the boards will be smaller too. The solution gives designers the option to make the devices smaller or run with longer battery power. With more space for batteries, you could even see devices where thin Li-Poly take up most of the underside of the netbook and offer capacities that will allow you to leave your netbook on all day. An always-on netbook is a seriously interesting prospect!

Cost

It’s difficult to do a complete estimate on this but experience tells me that in quantities, the highly integrated Snapdragon platforms would be significantly cheaper than a full Atom-based motherboard build-out.

Markets

This could go two ways. Initially I would expect to see manufacturers use the new Snapdragon platform to make cheaper Linux-based netbooks that will go into some of the emerging markets in India and China. These markets are less sensitive to desktop OS types due to the shorter history of XP and Vista. We will see some low-cost and long-battery life versions coming to ‘our’ markets (I speak to 80% of readers when I say that; Americas, Europe, Japan) but without XP, the devices won’t get the traction and channels that the Intel-based devices will. There’s one thing that could change this though and I know for sure that people are working on this. High-quality consumer focused, easy-to-use, reliable, branded, thin operating systems. Operating systems that completely hide their roots and offer a slick UI, rich applications suite, content and branding. So far we haven’t seen anything but there are a few projects and companies out there that are working on this. The Open Handset Alliance work has potential. Moblin too. They will need a good company to ‘finish’ the product though and the branding will need to come from a big name in order to give it traction. It will need that all-important app-store too. The one OS that could really change the game though is WM7. I don’t really expect this to happen but if it is an OS that offers a large-screen experience and the opportunity to work with native document formats and in both a ‘business’ and ‘consumer’ mode, there’s no reason why it can’t be used as a netbook OS.

Back to that article now. (Sorry, I got carried away. I actually wanted to write a quick re-blog article!) CNet mentions a few companies working on solutions:

Companies including Acer, Asus, and Toshiba are planning devices based on Snapdragon, according to Qualcomm. Acer, for example, will initially introduce Qualcomm’s Gobi 3G modem into its devices, then gravitate to products based on Snapdragon.

Of course we need to take that with a pinch of salt considering the fact that there are already supposed to be 15 ultra mobile devices out there running on Snapdragon.

Qualcomm demonstrated a Snapdragon based netbook in London last week and gave us a few hints as to how netbook-style devices based on it might turn out. Silicon.com, who published images and information from the event, asks if it’s the next-gen netbook.

‘Alternative-gen’ is more like it in my opinion.

We probably won’t see many of these in the western world as we like our processing power (way) too much but I do expect these to be a success in 2009 and 2010 in other markets. Markets that haven’t really had the chance to use laptops and who’s main form of communication is a GSM phone could benefit from this.

We could see one or two ultra-light, ultra-thin devices here but for them to be a success, they are going to have to offer levels of portability, user interfaces and battery life that only a few companies are in the position to be able to achieve.

As for battery life, in normal Internet-connected scenarios, there won’t be much advantage as screens and radios take the lions-share of the battery. There’s a lot of talk about multi-day battery life but the people that talk about this fail to mention that it’s standby life. Once you start switching those transistors on and off to decode today’s intensive web pages, power drain rises into the same ballpark as ultra low power X86-based devices. Even Qualcomm themselves are being honest about this.

Snapdragon will enable mini laptop style devices – with screens of between nine and 12 inches – to run for between four to six hours without needing to be charged, according to a spokesman.

The last time I spoke to Texas Instruments, they were talking about similar figures too. The 3-4W total power drain range is about the limit of technology for 8-12″ screens in the short term.

Personally, I think the more interesting market, is the mobile Internet device market where 5″ screens enable the best balance between size, portability and quality for video, navigation and our old friend, the world wide web. It’s here, where screen power drain is much smaller, that the new ARM-based platforms could make a bigger impact. Those ARM-based devices were supposed to be in the market already but appear to have been delayed. According to word-of-mouth reports that i’m hearing though, devices are on their way. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple putting out a larger, more powerful iPod web and video-focused device on these architectures in 2009. ComputerWorld thinks so too. Unless Apple have something up their sleeve with PA-Semi

Despite Samsung reporting just a few weeks ago that a MID will come ‘sooner or later’ and there only being 11 days left in June, Aving are reporting that Qualcomm are saying (ahem, not exactly first hand news this is it!) that Samsung will release a MID in June 2008. The quoted specs included a 1Ghz ARMv7 which is going to be very fast indeed. ARMv7 is the ARM-licensed architecture used inside the Cortex-based processors which are said to be four times as fast as current ARM architectures for the same clockrate. If that’s right, this Samsung device could have something like 10 times the processing power of the Nokia N810. Of course, that’s just based on marketing talk but even if it’s half as good, this baby could really fly! The Qualcomm platform that will be used is known as ‘Snapgragon’ which includes the ARMv7 core, a 600Mhz DSP for A/V operations, support for high-end photography and a universal modem that will keep most anyone in the world confident that it’s going to work with their carrier. Here are some of the key features of Snapdragon:

• Universal Modem supporting all 2G and 3G mobile broadband standards (CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, Revisions B, A and 0; HSPA, WCDMA, GSM / GPRS / EDGE)
• High definition video decode (720P)
• 3D graphics with up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec
• High resolution XGA display support
• 12-megapixel camera [support for.. – Ed]
• Support for multiple video codecs
• Audio codecs: (AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, FR, EFR, HR, WB-AMR, G.729a, G.711 , AAC stereo encode)
• Support for Broadcast TV (MediaFLOTM , DVB-H and ISDB-T)

No images of the device were shown in the Aving article which might indicate that the launch is yet to happen at WITS 2008. The images below show demonstrators presented by Qualcomm at CES in Jan. Maybe we’ll see one of them with the Samsung brand on it but it’s more likely that Samsung have kept their own ID under wraps.

Qualcomm ‘Anchorage’ demonstrators shown at CES. (Geek.com)

This image of the ‘Anchorage’ device from MSMobiles news

The big question is, what OS will we see on this device? Windows Mobile 6.1 is currently the most likely option but if you’re breaking into a new product category that sits close to your existing products you might want to be differentiating it somehow. Could this be the first Android device?

Qualcomm have already said that up to 15 Snapdragon-based devices would be released in 2008 and Samsung, along with HTC, have long been known as customers so maybe we really can expect something in the next week. Will ARM beat Intel to the MID market?

WorldITShow website. News from Aving.

Maybe I should have waited a few more weeks to write that article about how the smartphone platform is developing into a mobile computing platform. I said that it could be months before we see any sort of reality but today Qualcomm have demonstrated an Inventec OEM mini-laptop running on a Snapdragon ARM-core processor.

There aren’t any pics available at the moment but the notebook is said, in this article from PC World, to be "small and streamlined." Not surprising because Nvidia also showed their new Tegra platform sitting inside an EEE PC casing today and apparently the complete motherboard was just 45mm x 45mm.

The most interesting thing though are comments related to Windows Mobile 7.

Microsoft Windows Mobile 7, which is made for chips used in mobile phones, will be more laptop friendly than older versions of Windows Mobile, said Luis Pineda, senior vice president at Qualcomm, on the sidelines of a news conference in Taipei.

Windows Mobile 7 could be a key for the mobile phone industry in the future if they hope to take a bite out of the growing market for mini-notebooks such as the Eee PC that have 7-inch to 10-inch screens, weigh less than 1 kilogram and connect wirelessly to the Internet.

I have no problem with a netbook running Windows Mobile 7 as long as the applications are as rich as they are on the desktop. I’m sure many others will be happy too and if the device does the job, for the same price but returns a much better battery life[1] ARM-based devices are going to have a lot of advantages.

Qualcomm are expecting device to be available before the end of the year.

[1] While these ARM-based CPUs run at lower power requirements, the biggest power drains on netbooks are actually screen backlighting, storage and radio power. Advantages for ARM-based devices in 2008 could be significant, offering an estimated double, in-use battery life. Towards the end of 2009 though, Intel is expected to have the Moorestown platform available which will narrow the margin to very small levels.

Another Snapdragon-related report from Stacey at GigaOM who quotes Qualcomm as saying they have 15 device manufacturers lined up for Snapdragon-based devices that should be available in 2008.

That’s a lot. But not if Qualcomms or Stacey’s definition of a ultra mobile PC is different from mine. If we re-name the devices, mobile Internet smartphones and consider the prototypes shown at CES then I can believe it because in the smartphone world, every manufacturer has to play the Internet game in the top quartile of their product ranges. Anything less than a Cortex-based device is risking being under-powered for the heavyweight world of ‘real’ Internet.

I’m excited that the ARM-based devices are moving into the mobile Internet market. It means competition and learning. Take the best of everything in 2008/9 and 2010 is going to bring some absolute gems based on Cortex 9, Mobile-ITX and Moorestown.

In a week where we’ve been bombarded by news (or Pyrotechnics as Richard Brown of VIA, calls it) from the Intel IDF, it’s important to remember the other side of the fence. Over in smartphone, pmp and pocketPC land, things are happening just as quickly. The PR machine isn’t as big but the products could be just as capable.

GigaOm interviewed Qualcomm’s Dr. Sanjay Jha , COO and president of its CDMA technologies division last week and put a few interesting Ultra Mobile related questions his way.

Stacey Higginbbotham asked the following:

When will these [snapdragon-based] devices come out, and how does this compete with Intel’s Atom processors for ultra-mobile PCs?

Sanjay replies: Devices using Snapdragon will come out in the second half of this year, before or after Christmas. And I wouldn’t say we’re competing with Intel because we want to focus on a pocket-sized device that you can carry with you. Intel’s specifications for Atom are focused on a device with a 7-inch to 9-inch display.

I think Sanjay needs to do a little bit more research. 20 manufacturers are licensed (as ARM might say!) to produce MIDs and all should produce devices before Christmas. Nearly all of the devices will fall smack-bang into the pocket-sized market so Qualcomm, you DO have competition.

ARM-based MIDS will come and i’m sure we’ll see them with longer battery life and smaller designs than with Atom but will they be powerful enough to handle the a full browser and all the media that a user can throw at them?

GigaOm interview.

Via ElectronRun

Qualcomm are showing off a couple of mobile platforms at CES.  They aren’t UMPCs or even x86 devices but they’re certainly Mobile Internet targeted. On the lower image, the platform known as ‘Ancorage’ (Also shown above next to an iPhone) is running Windows Mobile.

Both this demonstrator and the ‘Fairbanks’ variant are running the ‘snapdragon’ platform which I wrote about recently. Its a Ghz-capable platform utilising the scorpion, Cortex A8 ARM architechture. HTC and Samsung have already shown interest in this and I personally think its going to be going head-to-head with Intel’s Menlow. Take a look at some MIDs that have been shown at CES. The target markets are exactly the same.

Gigabyte MID on Menlow platform.

Qualcomm are just showing these off as demonstrators of their mobile platform and it looks like they’re made by Inventec but the focus is clear – Mobile Internet!

Source: Geek.com. Thanks for the tip Stfu!

Almost a year ago, we heard about new Marvel ‘Monahans’ processors that were capable of Ghz+ speeds. It turned out that the Ghz figures where only test speeds but even so, the 800Mhz of the Monahans PXA 320 was pretty impressive. A version of the chip is going to appear in the Ipaq 214 at 624 Mhz (capable of 30fpx H264 at VGA res apparently…very tasty!) and I’m going to be keeping an eye on that PocketPC very closely. Especially is Opera Mobile 9 launches soon.

Today we’re hearing about another ARM-based solution from Qualcomm. Its the Snapdragon mobile device platform which includes the Scorpion Cortex-A8 processor *1 (references to this processor go way back to 2006 so its nothing new) that can scale to 1Ghz. Qualcomm call it the worlds fastest mobile processor.

• XGA display support with LCDC
• Up to 12.0 megapixel camera
• WVGA encode/decode
• Supports Launchpadâ„¢ audio and video solutions including: Qcameraâ„¢, Qtvâ„¢, Qvideophoneâ„¢, Qcamcorderâ„¢
• Digital audio support for MP3, aacPlusâ„¢ and Enhanced aacPlus
• Ubiquitous Connectivity. Support for all mobile broadband standards and many technologies complementary to WWAN finally delivers on the promise of seamless always-on connectivity.
• Universal Modem supporting all 2G and 3G mobile broadband standards (CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, Revisions B, A and 0; HSPA, WCDMA, GSM / GPRS / EDGE)
• Support for IEEE 802.11 (WLAN) and VoIP with VCC capabilities
• Broadcast technologies: MediaFLOâ„¢, SDMB, ISDB-T,TDMB, and DVB-H with QUALCOMM’s UBMâ„¢ universal broadcast modem
• Support for Bluetooth® 2.0 + EDR solution for personal wireless connectivity

According to the press release and WindowsForDevices, Samsung and HTC are adopting this platform for some of their future products. For some I can’t get the word ‘Android’ out of my head!

Press release. Thanks to JKK and Kenneth for the tips.

*1. Some info on Scorpion, its processing power and architechture here.