The frequency of smart phone news is quickening. With the release of the Palm Pre running on the 600mhz ARM cortex A8 processor we've been jetisoned into a different era. The iPhone 3GS was released quickly after using the same CPU and faster 3D acceleration. Motorolla followed up with the Droid and now it seems weekly we have more 600 mhz cell phones being released. Not only do I wonder about having 600 mhz in my pocket I wonder about the effeciency of the software. There was a time when a 50mhz Motorolla 68060 was a screaming cpu that did everything you ever wished. Now we 600 mhz in our cell phones and are yearning for more. I think there's just too many levels of abstraction.
Anyway the purpose of this post is to comment on a new announcement by Ziilabs, a division of Creative Technology. The interesting point of their Concept phone is the cpu is a dual core ARM 9 (mhz unknown). This is the current generation CPU. The next phone they'll put out will migrate to a 1 ghz Cortex A8 based System on Chip. This would roughly be a 1 ghz iPhone. Not only that but the concept phone has the following specs.
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-band WCDMA, HSDPA Cat 8 at 7.2mbps
- Linux-based Zii Optimized Android and Plaszma Support
- Accelerated OpenGL ES 3D Graphics, Video and Imaging
- 3.1" 480x800 16M colour Active Matrix OLED with capacitive multi-touch
- Mini HDMI port for 1080p video output
- Xtreme Fidelity#8482 X-Fi audio technology
- 5M pixel rear facing, auto-focus camera
- VGA forward facing camera for video conferencing
- USB 2.0 Micro port for connectivity and charging
- MicroSD storage expansion and SIM card slots
- 256MB low-power DDR memory
- Integrated Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR and Hardware GPS
- Composite Video output
- 1130mAH lithium polymer battery
From this list you might have an idea where they're going with this phone since it has both HDMI and Composite Video output. They also mention Xtreme Fidelity audio and accelerated 3D support. With the dual ARM 9 cpus they are able to support 1080p playback using H.264, plus 1080p, 24fps encoding, and simultaneous H.264 encode and decode at 720p for videoconferencing. When they move to the 1ghz ARM cortex A8 SoC they'l be able to support full Blu-Ray at 60fps. Get the picture yet? This is something thats very hard to do with the most powerful desktop PC. In addition to that the new cpu will provide 3D acceleration with up to 1 Gigapixel fill rate.
As a side note it runs two versions of Linux (of course) - a specially optimized version of Android and their own Plaszma Linux which I know nothing about.