Early 2014 for availability so it will be a direct Merrifield competitor.
BARCELONA - More cores, or more gigahertz? As we demand more from our phones and tablets, ST-Ericsson, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are heading in different directions to power upcoming handheld beasts, with Qualcomm and Nvidia championing quad-core and ST-Ericsson showing off an amazing 3-GHz processor at Mobile World Congress.
ST-Ericsson's 3-GHz, dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based NovaThor L8580 isn't a gimmick, said Marc Cetto, the company's senior vice president of 3G multimedia platforms. It's designed to speed up things average smartphone owners are really concerned about, like application launch times.
Current Android apps aren't written to take advantage of multiple cores very well, Cetto said. As a result, a processor with fewer, faster cores will offer better performance than one with more, slower cores.
To show off the processor, ST-Ericsson launched a game on a Samsung Galaxy S III with a quad-core Samsung Exynos, Cortex-A9 processor running at 1.4 GHz and on a demo phone with the 3-GHz L8580. On the Galaxy S III, the game took 17 seconds to launch. On the demo phone, it only took nine seconds.
Compared to a Nexus 10 tablet with a Samsung Exynos 5250 dual ARM cortex-A15, the L8580 launched the game a little bit faster, but the gap had closed. The Nexus 10 took 12 seconds, and the ST-Ericsson device took 10. Newer designs like Nvidia's Tegra 4 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 may be faster yet. Cetto said that ST-Ericsson isn't actually trying to compete with Qualcomm's and Nvidia's top-of-the-line chips, but rather to offer an affordable product with a balance of performance, battery life and cost.
A processor built with traditional bulk CMOS technology running at this speed would be boiling hot; the reason ST-Ericsson can crank its processor up this fast is its use of FD-SOI technology, a different way of building processors that lets its designs run much cooler. In another demo, ST-Ericsson showed that its FD-SOI processors run at least 18 degrees cooler and use less power than a similar processor built with bulk CMOS, when doing processor intensive tasks. On the Dhrystone benchmark, the FD-SOI chip ran at 31 percent less power; with the GLBenchmark graphics benchmark, it ran at 7 percent less power.
That means phones built on ST-Ericsson's process can use up to 35 percent less power than similar chips built using bulk CMOS, according to another demo in the ST-Ericsson booth. That means longer battery life for these phones.
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