Smartphone Silicon: The 2010 CTIA Wireless Show Roundup

The Snapdragon CPU used in the HTC EVO 4G is the QSD8650 along with 512MB RAM and 1GB of onboard storage. The QSD8650 has a Scorpion core at its heart, which is a specific implementation of the ARMv7 architecture. With an architecture license from ARM, Qualcomm spent almost 4 years and more than $300 million in designing it. Fabricated at TSMC in the 65nm process, the custom implementation can be clocked upto 1GHz. The performance of this single core ARMv7 implementation lies between that of ARM's own Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 designs. However, the CPU core in an app processor is only part of the story. The majority of the capabilities of the app processor lie in the surrounding IP, namely, the components responsible for the graphics, DSP and media processing, as well as the SoC infrastructure.

It is in this IP that Qualcomm may be said to be lacking. In the QSD8650, the GPU core is the Adreno 200. Qualcomm acquired AMD's handheld graphics unit for $65 million in 2006 and inherited the Imageon product line. This was later rechristened as Adreno, and to this date, Qualcomm uses graphics cores from this product line for their app processors. Unfortunately, the raw performance numbers for this product line don't compare well with the same generation product from other vendors such as Imagination Tech and Vivante, which are used by TI and Marvell respectively. The DSP and media processing in the QSD8650 is nothing to write home about either. With support for only upto 720p HD video encode / decode, it faces stiff competition from other app processors (which boast of 1080p encode / decode) being introduced into the market this year. It will be interesting to see how Qualcomm improves the Snapdragon platform in the dual core avatar slated for introduction later this year. We will cover the Snapdragon platform in more detail in a later article.