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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Jim Mullens who wrote (109676)2/18/2012 11:08:15 AM
From: waitwatchwander  Respond to of 197035
 
Dual channel memory and pci express bus extension likely also help with the video matter I noted with my Mirasol display. Apple and Qualcomm are tackling at the heart of computerphone issues.



To: Jim Mullens who wrote (109676)2/18/2012 11:16:16 AM
From: pheilman_2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 197035
 
dual channel memory bandwidth

Turns out CPUs and GPUs have very different demands for memory, and memory can only be configured one way.

A CPU needs low latency because it needs a new piece of data now to keep running. The new piece of data is located pretty much randomly through out memory. So the memory needs to be setup for low latency and bandwidth is not so critical. CPUs don't really care about bandwidth, but latency slows them to a crawl.

A GPU needs massive bandwidth. Each pixel in the new frame is going to be touched several times before the 60 Hz update. The next piece of data is adjacent to the most recent piece of data requested. The memory holds the last accessed bank "open" and when the GPU requests again the data is available very quickly. The trade-off is that a random access is quite a bit slower.

The memory chips are configured at start up to either keep the banks open for bandwidth or close the banks for lowest latency. Merging CPUs and GPUs doesn't actually pay off due to the memory behavior, didn't work for AMD/ATI and won't work for NVIDIA, unless there are two memory controllers that can be set for the requester.



To: Jim Mullens who wrote (109676)2/18/2012 11:50:27 AM
From: slacker711  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 197035
 
Do you know how the other ( OMAP / Samsung / Apple, etc) AP competitor’s stack up?

They all support higher memory bandwidth (dual-channel). nVidia is clearly the exception. I'm not sure if Tegra3+ will change this or if it is simply Tegra3 on 28nm.

The good news though is that Q's competition for high-end tablet design wins is mostly Tegra3. Apple is in-house and Exynos hasnt gained traction yet outside of Samsung. OMAP4 has done well, but Krait should outperform any dual-core A9 chip and TI has stated that OMAP5 (dual-core A15) will "maybe" be out by Q4 of this year.

So that leaves quite a bit of room for Q to grab some design wins. Of course, nobody outside of Apple has gained much traction yet with high-end tablets but at least Qualcomm will be in the game.

Slacker



To: Jim Mullens who wrote (109676)2/18/2012 3:29:12 PM
From: Maurice Winn1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 197035
 
That presumably also means the end of Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless aka BREW. < We should also note that it appears the Qualcomm thinks the feature phone market is dead, as the company is only planning a single new part for next year as far as we can tell. We're not surprised though, as the only really valid change here would really be to do a die shrink if anything, as it's not as if the feature phone marking is moving forward in leaps and bounds. >

Apart from patent developments, which are sold much too cheaply, with any new ones not seeming to add any value as the previous patent portfolio already maximizes the royalties at something like 3% or 4%, the only big time thing Qualcomm has going is semiconductor design. Thank goodness for Sanjay Jha's time getting that lineup going.

Android has made BREW irrelevant and now they have Sanjay too.

[This post goes awol after this so some of you should stop reading now]

It's now 20 years since the great physics-busting early patents and their time is up.

An unlicensed newbie, without any legacy agreements on Qualcomm patents, could start up and do anything they like, especially with the pressure coming onto what's FRANDly and what's not. Apple had never made a phone and came from nowhere and is heading for being the world's first $1 trillion company, which they would already be if their P:E was the same as Qualcomm's or a lot of other companies.

What has happened reminds me of the Homebrew Computer Club: en.wikipedia.org A bunch of nerdy youngsters were tinkering around with their Homebrew when along came Wozniak and Jobs who realized what the heck was going on, and what was doable and did it. Decades later, Jobs and co. peered over the fence at the mobile phone world and saw a bunch of nerdy Geeks tinkering with Qualcomm's BREW and mobile phones and small computers and decided that they would do the same again. Hey presto, whiz bang, the iPhone and bingo, the iPad.

Steve Jobs must have been the Second Coming as he has turned loose the peer to peer mobile Cyberspace revolution. The Romans were up against Jesus's peer to peer revolution and tried hard to skoosh it but the Vatican ended up ruling Rome, with Saint Peter's and the Sistine Chapel far more interesting than the Colosseum. Now that he's safely dead, he can't resist being made into the Second Coming. Being dead is great for creating legends. I met Steve Wozniak at a Segway rally a few years ago so I claim to be one of the apostles. Please elect me the first Papal authority on "Steve Jobs" which is just an anagram and disguise for "Jesus". The v is a u as in Bvgalri [the Italian firm en.bulgari.com ]. So we should write it Jesvs to differentiate Steve from the first time around. The original Book of Job: en.wikipedia.org

See how he just sneaked in amongst us and perhaps didn't even know himself that he was the conduit for the resurrection, though he adopted the idea anyway.

Here's the original, with God firing up Adam, now we need a similar picture with Jesvs firing up Siri.

Does anyone know an artist as good as Michelangelo?

Send money and I'll get the show on the road. Large denominations are acceptable. Any acolytes wanting a position, applications will be accepted after 12 March [around the ides of March].

Meanwhile, The Rapture obviously means those who believe will literally be transformed into Avatars, freed of their bodily functions, roaming through Cyberspace. Now we need Armageddon and the Mayan calendar - oh, that's handy, the Mayan calendar ends this year so we don't have to wait long. "Beam me up Scotty" won't involve a physical reincorporation of 70kg of wet chemistry in another location. It will be more like The Matrix. A lot of baby boomers, noticing their declining physiological functions, and not to put too fine a point on it, their cognitive competence, would be starting to think that such a reincorporation as an Avatar in Cyberspace would be a better choice than the alternative.

Imagine having that whole Google data base as auto-recall as though it really is just your own personal memory.

Rather than have discussion here, which rapidly becomes politics, I have started a stream of consciousness about Steve Jobs as JESVS here: Subject 58600

Mqurice and Jesvs, together to the end.

WARNING - do NOT send money to fake imitators Made in China [or anywhere else]. Their's will be made of melamine or something.