[General Topics] Menneisyys:
IMPORTANT NOTE: this is the nth part of my MWC (Barcelona) report series (a lot more to come!). Of course, I’ll try to cross-post them here too (I couldn’t do so while in Barcelona because of the very slow & expensive Internet connection), but it’ll take a lot of time; in the meantime, feel free to check out the original articles. It’s REALLY worth checking out them: many of them contain info that you won’t ever read anywhere else. Furthermore, some of the more “thematic” articles discuss all the news of a given area (audio encoding, Web browsing, advanced Bluetooth etc.)

MWC Audio Encoding News Roundup; Skype cracked!

MWC: Breaking Sony-Ericsson XPERIA X1 news & pics!

MWC: Bluetooth news: A2DP news & reviews (e.g. Voyager 855); a new BT access point; Nokia’s new DVB-H transmitter

MWC: Web browsing: WebKit, Thunderhawk news; a dedicated Web browser handheld

MWC: the competition: BlackBerry (RIM) and Nokia

MWC: Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 to come with WM 6.5?

MWC: a really-really great e-paper & WindowsCE- based (!) phone & reader from Polymer Vision: Readius – the first foldable(!) e-book reader ever

MWC: more S-E Xperia X1 shots & info; it'll be based on the Qualcomm chipset?

MWC: more S-E Xperia X1 info & photos

MWC Report Part I: Opera Mobile 9.5 pics, i-mate, Nokia, MS Press Conference, MSN Direct news etc.

OK, now, to the article:

Samsung

Architecture-wise, it’s without doubt Samsung’s MWC announcement of a brand new, high-end chipset (also having a CPU), the S3C6410 (and its budget version, the S3C6430), that may be the most interesting to Windows Mobile users.

As you may already know, Samsung’s SC3244x (for example, the SC32442 used in the HTC P6300 (HTC Panda), E-Ten’s late 2007/early 2008 models like the X650 and the M800 etc – see the complete list HERE and HERE for the SC32442 and the SC32440, respectively), the chipset used in several current(!) Windows Mobile devices, is REALLY outdated. I’ve shown numerous examples and proofs of this (see for example THIS) - for example, the very bad CPU usage of A2DP (about 50% at 400 MHz) and the complete lack of advanced multimedia (MP3 / AAC) en/decoding support (this is why you can’t, for example, use the high-quality Resco audio codec pack with (old) Samsung CPU’s, as has also been pointed out HERE). These two tasks are all far better handled by any other, current CPU’s like Intel XScales (even the “old” PXA-2XX ones) and TI OMAP’s (again, even the oldest ones used in Windows Mobile 5+ devices). The only real advantage of the SC3244x is the CPU usage-independent power consumption – the other two, above-mentioned architectures can’t boast with this. (See the bottom section of THIS article for a proof.)

Before MWC, as far as their newer chipsets are concerned, only the S3C6400 was known. For example, E-Ten’s brand new, high-end, feature-packed V900 (to be released in April) will have this chipset. (Currently, there’re no other existing/announced devices (see THIS) with this CPU.)

This chipset is the base (the direct predecessor, parent) of the new S3C6410/ S3C6430 models. In this respect, it’s pretty much comparable to the Marvell XScale PXA270 as opposed to the PXA310, let alone the even more feature-rich PXA320.

The just-announced S3C6410, which is an even more advanced version of the S3C6400 , is even better; for example, it supports hardware 3D acceleration. Again, it’s like the PXA310 or the PXA320 compared to the PXA270. Unfortunately, currently, no future devices are known to have it.

(the 3D performance demo of the brand new S3C6410; you can see the S3C6410 flier I’ve also made some shots of here)

(multimedia demo on the older S3C6400)

(HD AX audio decoding demo on the older S3C6400)