How do you keep increasing performance in a power constrained environment like a smartphone without decreasing battery life? You can design more efficient microarchitectures, but at some point you’ll run out of steam there. You can transition to newer, more power efficient process technologies but even then progress is very difficult to come by. In the past you could rely on either one of these options to deliver lower power consumption, but these days you have to rely on both - and even then it’s potentially not enough. Heterogeneous multiprocessing is another option available - put a bunch of high performance cores alongside some low performance but low power cores and switch between them as necessary.

NVIDIA recently revealed it was doing something similar to this with its upcoming Tegra 3 (Kal-El) SoC. NVIDIA outfitted its next-generation SoC with five CPU cores, although only a maximum of four are visible to the OS. If you’re running light tasks (background checking for email, SMS/MMS, twitter updates while your phone is locked) then a single low power Cortex A9 core services those needs while the higher performance A9s remain power gated. Request more of the OS (e.g. unlock your phone and load a webpage) and the low power A9 goes to sleep and the 4 high performance cores wake up. 

While NVIDIA’s solution uses identical cores simply built using different transistors (LP vs. G), the premise doesn’t change if you move to physically different cores. For NVIDIA, ARM didn’t really have a suitable low power core thus it settled on a lower power Cortex A9. Today, ARM is expanding the Cortex family to include a low power core that can either be used by itself or as an ISA-compatible companion core in Cortex A15 based SoCs. It’s called the ARM Cortex A7.

Let's recap the current smartphone/tablet SoC landscape. Everything shipping today is built on a 4x-nm process, built either at Global Foundries, Samsung, TSMC or UMC. Next year we'll see a move to 28nm (bringing better performance and power characteristics) but between now and the end of 2012 there will be a myriad of designs available on the market.

The table below encapsulates much of what you can expect over the next 12+ months:

The key is this: other than TI's OMAP 5 in the second half of 2012 and Qualcomm's Krait, no one else has announced plans to release a new microarchitecture in the near term. Furthermore, if we only look at the first half of next year, Qualcomm is the only company that's focused on significantly improving per-core performance through a new architecture. Everyone else is either scaling up in core count (NVIDIA) or clock speeds. As we've seen in the PC industry however, generational performance gaps are hard to overcome - even with more cores or frequency.

Read on for our analysis of Qualcomm's Krait architecture and the MSM8960.

There's a lot of speculation about the SoC used in Samsung's Galaxy S II, thankfully through process of elimination and some snooping around we've been able to figure it out - and run some preliminary performance tests.

Read on to see how it stacks up against the latest NVIDIA Tegra 2 based smartphones.

NVIDIA and Intel just released their respective PR announcements a bit ago, but after much rumor mongering it’s official: Intel and NVIDIA are the latest duo to bury the hatchet. This comes on the heels of 3 other major Intel actions in the past two years: the EU fining Intel (which is still under appeal), Intel settling with AMD (affirming GloFo as a legal venture), Intel settling with the United Stated Federal Trade Commission.

With the exception of the EU fine which is still under appeal, this is the final outstanding major legal battle for Intel over their actions of the first decade of the 21^st century. Generally speaking someone is always suing Intel – or Intel is always suing someone else – but as far as normality is concerned this is a return to normal for Intel: they’ve now settled with every significant government and corporate entity and are no longer living under a cloud of allegations from a number of parties.

So what are NVIDIA and Intel burying the hatchet over? A lot of this has to do with the same matters we saw in the FTC suit, as part of the FTC’s case was built on NVIDIA’s complaints. As you may recall the FTC didn’t get everything they wanted, and this suit looks to resolve those outstanding issues along with settling NVIDIA’s chipset allegations, and providing NVIDIA with a sizable 1.5bil compensation package for their troubles.