Qualcomm Shows Off Quad Core Krait APQ8064 at 1.5 GHz
by Brian Klug on February 27, 2012 7:37 AM ESTWe stopped by Qualcomm's booth today for our meeting and, among other things, saw the first demonstration of APQ8064 on a tablet mobile development platform. As a refresher, APQ connotes an SoC with no cellular baseband, and APQ8064 is the quad core 1.5 GHz version of Krait with Adreno 320 graphics.
The demo showed four 1080p videos being decoded on CPU for demonstrational purposes to load the cores - an actual shipping mobile platform would use hardware accelerated decode. Qualcomm's Trepn tool showed CPU frequency changing around as playback happened, but frequency maximum for all four cores running at 1512 MHz was shown. APQ8064 is still 28nm Krait V2, the same core as we recently characterized in our MDP MSM8960 performance preview.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
18 Comments
View All Comments
danjw - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Google Chrome for Android should be multi-threaded, since the desktop version is. Other developers will follow suit, or be left behind. Multicore is the direction everything is going.name99 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Pls give details on how Chrome is multi-threaded in a way that is relevant to this discussion.As far as I can tell, Chrome is multi-threaded in a way that is useful for two threads and little beyond that: it splits into a UI thread and a "rendering" thread. It can spawn off a few other threads, eg a thread to preprocess javascript. It can spawn off threads to match javascript threads --- which might matter if any important threaded javascript web apps existed.
I have never seen a realistic Chrome scenario that taxes more than two desktop CPU threads.
[For the amateurs in this thread. The point is NOT just how many threads your app is split into, it is how many of those threads usefully need to run simultaneously. Most of these threads have only a small amount of work to do and can easily run sequentially --- they don't need multiple cores. There are really only two "big" threads, and even they don't run full time on two cores.]
ssj4Gogeta - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I think danjw is talking about Chrome loading pages from different websites in different processes. But that I think was designed for security purposes and for preventing big memory leaks. On a tablet you typically wouldn't open too many webpages that need background processing anyway.bplewis24 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I'm more interested in this Adreno 320. Why couldn't Asus include this in their Transformer Prime Infinity t700 Eee Pad whateverthefunk?Brandon
sprockkets - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
Prob not ready in time. That and the LTE variant is more than good enough :)lilmoe - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
It's good enough, yes, but NOT for a throughout smooth experience... I've seen those full-HD displays running on tegra3 with hickups and lags present when opening the app drawer and in the browser. while these hickups are acceptable in mainstream tablets, i really doubt they are in the high-end realm, especially when competition is the likes of the galaxy tab 11.6 and the iPad3...Tegra3 and MSM8960 with the 225 adreno are going to be amazing on phones and sub-hd resolution tablets, but i believe an adreno 320 is needed for driving the resolution to full-hd and beyond. the guys at asus are pushing the tegra3 and the MSM8960 to the limits, which isn't a good idea.
lilmoe - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
i agree. the 320 is needed to run everything in that resolution smoothly without lags and hickups...Lucian Armasu - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
I was expecting the quad core 2.5 Ghz chip to arrive by the end of the year, since that's what they said. But if they're making this chip at 1.5 Ghz, it's a pretty clear indication that they won't release the 2.5 Ghz one as soon as we expected.