With Mango Comes New WP7 Chipsets
It looks like the Qualcomm Snapdragon won’t be the only Windows Phone chipset when Mango comes out. One of Nokia’s chip suppliers, ST-Ericcson, has told Reuters that they’re preparing chips for Nokia to use with their Windows Phones. A Chief-Executive stated “We expect this situation will not prevail. Now everything has changed. The environment is different…We will be ready when Nokia ramps big volumes.” I would love to see the floodgates open here and words like ‘dual-core’ get brought into the Windows Phone conversation. If you want to get a sense as to the specs of the ST-Ericcson chips take a read of this.
Mango can’t come fast enough…
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davidk
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Mango is supposed to be late Fall?
Android gets their first dual core in less than a week, iPhone most likely in July, and when do you want to bet on WP7? No way this comes out in 2011, say hello to 2012 for WP dual core goodness.
Benefits of dual core, other than bragging rights and suffering from keeping up with the Joneses syndrome?
@efjay: it’s both faster and more battery efficient because it can move work between the cores to keep them running in the cool range.
Ignoring me or looking up some stuff in the urban dictionary to bludgeon me with? LMAO
@Doug Smith: Oh I thought you were Simmons and jsut throwing in some hatoraid:) From the rumors, Nokia is permitted to use their own chipsets provided they test them, certify them, and add their own drivers. That’s a likely possibility. Also, we know MS has been working with other chipset makers so they can already be in the process of making the OS dual core compatable and also compatable with other chipsets. We’ve seen Mango already. The update already is done – they showed it on stage. So the next 6 months is purely refining it and adding to it. I have to presume that chipset compatability is high on their list.
This represents a major development fork. These are SOC with integrated graphics. Just “compatibility” with a ARM8 instruction set is hardly sufficient.
Obviously, MS/Nokia/Erickson has the engineers to create a fork. Overtime, I would expect the Snapdragon base to evaporate. Since Snapdragon is the primary Android SOC, I think what you are seeing is MS walking away from its effort to compete with Android in the Snapdragon design space.
MS is emulating the Apple “A4” design decision. It has absorbed the proprietary chip design paradigm.
@DavidK:
No question they are faster and more battery efficient on paper but will that speed actually bring a perceptible diference to WP7? MTW disagrees http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2011/02/17/why-windows-phone-7-doesnt-desperately-need-more-powerful-devices-this-year/ and so far its not been shown to be that much faster than WP7, and remember there will be performance improvements in the first update further closing the gap. I know its just me, few months ago we didnt need dual core and I just dont see where the need really comes from apart from wanting to follow the trend.
The new Zune browser is snslririugpy good, but not as good as the iPod’s. It works well, but isn’t as fast as Safari, and has a clunkier interface. If you occasionally plan on using the web browser that’s not an issue, but if you’re planning to browse the web alot from your PMP then the iPod’s larger screen and better browser may be important.