I Can't Believe No One Mentioned It Yet.


Phawx

Professional Derailer
Joined
Oct 1, 2008
Messages
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Did anyone see that they are going to be producing the new Cortex A9 on 28nm process. That is insane! I was so sure when I read that headline, I thought to myself, "Holy shit, the Pandora forums are going to be flipping the fuck out." and then I check and no one mentions it. So I say, "Well someone will mention it."

And then ED has to come along and make an announcement of cool things and I guess everyone forgot. Well Tough Titties!

In case the manufacturing process went over your head, Intel is only STARTING work with 34nm Process and newer GPU's are done with a 40nm process.

What does a smaller process DO, you might ask (smugly with Starbucks coffee in hand)?

EVERYTHING. Less Energy, Higher attainable frequency. AKA, FTWW = For the Win/Win.

All this time I thought Intel was the king of Fab tech and then out comes Global Foundries (A spin-off of AMD) and they got there shit down to a very small process. I guess we can attribute this to a simpler design. ARM vs current x86 / GPU's. But I mean, DAMN 28nm, I thought that was two years away. Basically this Cortex A9 from Global foundries will be in the most bad ass mobile devices next year. Obviously OP is going to want to wait for the software to mature and sell quite a few more regular Pandora's before moving on. But in 3-4 years time. If Global Foundries does this again with Cortex A9 successor, it will be tits!

Pandora 2 is looking like it will take significantly less energy and be many times more powerful. We should already start on PS3 and Xbox 360 Emulation. You know, for the future.
 
I think we already had a thread about the Cortex A9.
Also, given the time the A8 needed to establish itself, i doubt we will be seeing many A9 devices in 2010.
 
What exactly are they going to be manufacturing at that die size? A standalone Cortex-A9 wouldn't be that interesting since most applications benefit from having it in an SoC. To be an SoC all of the components would have to function at that die size. We know OMAP4 won't debut there, and that's the only A9 SoC I'm even aware of right now.
 
Hmm, so the new chips will be more powerful than the old ones while using less energy. Fascinating.
I think there will be plenty of time to speculate on this once the chips actually exist, and are being sold, and are being considered for a Pandora hardware update.
 
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