quartercast
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"iGame" V10 Android Game Console
- Thread starter quartercast
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Could be possible. Right now the specs are saying it is a Contex A10 but there is no Cortex A10 out there AFAIK.
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Allwinner A10... so that's where they got that A10 from.
So an A8 from China that claims to be better than everything else, able to run videos with hardware acceleration of 4x FullHD?
It would be interesting to get a benchmark from that... I've seen so many chinese devices claiming to be the best you could get with awesome looking specs that just turned out to be very slow in the end
So an A8 from China that claims to be better than everything else, able to run videos with hardware acceleration of 4x FullHD?
It would be interesting to get a benchmark from that... I've seen so many chinese devices claiming to be the best you could get with awesome looking specs that just turned out to be very slow in the end
the_marshal
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I don't know were you can find the best benchmark but there are tablets currently shipping with this SoC: http://tabletrepublic.com/forum/cortex-a8-allwinner-a10/
I have to say the Ainol Novo 7 Aurora which uses this SoC seems pretty impresive for a sub 200$ tablet: Winner A10, 1.2GHz, 1GB of ram and 7'' 1024 x 600 IPS display (!). The Chinese are producing tablet at a crazy rate... most of them still have crappy 800x480 display (I have seen my share in Bangkok recently) but they are getter better and better.
I have to say the Ainol Novo 7 Aurora which uses this SoC seems pretty impresive for a sub 200$ tablet: Winner A10, 1.2GHz, 1GB of ram and 7'' 1024 x 600 IPS display (!). The Chinese are producing tablet at a crazy rate... most of them still have crappy 800x480 display (I have seen my share in Bangkok recently) but they are getter better and better.
Allwinner A10... so that's where they got that A10 from.
So an A8 from China that claims to be better than everything else, able to run videos with hardware acceleration of 4x FullHD?
It would be interesting to get a benchmark from that... I've seen so many chinese devices claiming to be the best you could get with awesome looking specs that just turned out to be very slow in the end
The Rockchip tablet i owned was not that bad. The price tag was 99 € so it was very cheap for a tablet with 800x600 and usb host port. Not to mention the real Android Market that was pre installed
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Allwinner A10... so that's where they got that A10 from.
So an A8 from China that claims to be better than everything else, able to run videos with hardware acceleration of 4x FullHD?
It would be interesting to get a benchmark from that... I've seen so many chinese devices claiming to be the best you could get with awesome looking specs that just turned out to be very slow in the end
CPU performance you'd see from a benchmark and video acceleration are really different things.. latter is advancing all the time and now everyone is in a pissing contest over how much die space they're throwing down to support overblown HD standards that no one has videos for in the first place. See nVidia, they're doing the exact same thing with Tegra 3. The A10 probably churns power while running these things.
The 1.5GHz Cortex-A8 part is probably just a lie. Even if they are fabbing at a 45nm or 40nm plant instead of 65nm (doubt it, don't know of any Chinese ones up and running that can do this yet, foreign would add too much to the cost) I don't see how they could reach it reliably. It is possible that they're at least running on a performance optimized process instead of a leakage optimized one, giving them a little more clocks than you'd expect from a cell phone SoC.
This thread seems to rebuke 1.5GHz on this chip:
http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/25116-1ghz-12ghz-15ghz-which-is-it/
So probably adding up GPU and CPU once again, like with the Yinlips
Anyone wants a chinese Pandora?
It runs with 1,1GHz or even up to 1,8GHz overclocked (DSP, SGX and CPU added together)
Anyone wants a chinese Pandora?
It runs with 1,1GHz or even up to 1,8GHz overclocked (DSP, SGX and CPU added together)
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
So probably adding up GPU and CPU once again, like with the Yinlips
Anyone wants a chinese Pandora?
It runs with 1,1GHz or even up to 1,8GHz overclocked (DSP, SGX and CPU added together)
Yeah, and costs $150
So probably adding up GPU and CPU once again, like with the Yinlips
Anyone wants a chinese Pandora?
It runs with 1,1GHz or even up to 1,8GHz overclocked (DSP, SGX and CPU added together)
Yeah, and costs $150
Ummm.... the keyboard is so expensive
But honestly, I had some discussions with GC and EBV about those cheap prices from China already... not really sure, how they get such low prices.
Material costs of the Pandora alone are more than 160 EUR already...
We've got some guesses (like Chinese companies selling parts way cheaper to other companies in China, multiple companies sharing part orders to get better bulk prices, etc.), but we don't really know.
GC once got a Xilink part from China for a good price - about 10% of those parts failed, and when they contacted Xilink about it, they told them was a cheap chinese clone...
So, not sure how they get those prices, but the three most expensive parts in the Pandora (memory, SoC, LCD) already add up to about 100 EUR alone.
Allwinner A10... so that's where they got that A10 from.
So an A8 from China that claims to be better than everything else, able to run videos with hardware acceleration of 4x FullHD?
It would be interesting to get a benchmark from that... I've seen so many chinese devices claiming to be the best you could get with awesome looking specs that just turned out to be very slow in the end
Someone is going to produce a miniboard with a allwinner a10... it looks promising:
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/news/
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Ummm.... the keyboard is so expensive
But honestly, I had some discussions with GC and EBV about those cheap prices from China already... not really sure, how they get such low prices.
Material costs of the Pandora alone are more than 160 EUR already...
We've got some guesses (like Chinese companies selling parts way cheaper to other companies in China, multiple companies sharing part orders to get better bulk prices, etc.), but we don't really know.
GC once got a Xilink part from China for a good price - about 10% of those parts failed, and when they contacted Xilink about it, they told them was a cheap chinese clone...
So, not sure how they get those prices, but the three most expensive parts in the Pandora (memory, SoC, LCD) already add up to about 100 EUR alone.
I could give you some ideas of what I think are causing the cost differences..
1) You pay more for components from a distributor in Europe because components have VAT applied every time they change hands. In America, for instance, only end-user products are taxed.
2) Distributor's cut as well.. I know vs BOM prices I saw TI is selling for cheaper. TI themselves charge comparatively more for OMAP than say, Samsung or Freescale charge for their SoCs and of course Chinese SoCs made on old 65nm processes fabricated natively and with a lot less custom IP are going to cost even less. Not that you can't buy them outside of China, like Amlogic's (not that you necessarily should)
3) Buying in EU instead of USD for companies offering in USD (or even better for Chinese native components, RMB/CNY), incurring conversion overhead
4) The LCD at ~$50 doesn't seem very cheap to me at all, I got a quote from a Hong Kong supplier for a 4.8" 800x480 Taiwanese (like Pandora's) LCD + resistive digitizer that had reasonable specs in its datasheet, it was $15 for 5000k quantity.. of course I didn't get samples so I don't know if it had some kind of big problems. Its power consumption was decently worse than Pandora's, which seems very good for its class - maybe there's a big cost associated with that? But it goes without saying that these Chinese PMPs aren't using $50 LCDs.
5) PoP is relatively expensive, although IIRC Pandora's is currently < $20 on Digikey (that includes NAND).. anyway these designs are mostly using external DDR2 instead, which of course uses more power and board space but is much cheaper (is made in China, for one thing.. anyway look at what RAM costs on cheap PC DIMMs, the cost per-chip is very low, 1GB of the stuff could probably be had for under $5). More importantly, you can get it assembled in China because they don't need special equipment to handle PoP.. someone I talked to who has experience with Chinese designs didn't even know PoP existed. As you're aware even finding a company that'll do it low volume in the west is hard, and I'm sure you pay much much more at GP than these Chinese assembly houses charge. For storage they use whatever cheapest micro-SD cards they can get.
6) The components have better integration, part of that is due to them being newer.. a lot of these Chinese SoCs have built-in HDMI transceivers for instance. Some have built-in audio and even some power regulation, or at the very least need simpler PMICs. Unlike OMAP3 most SoCs now have 3.3V I/Os natively, which mean they don't need all the level shifters Pandora does which takes up precious board space..
7) Two nubs both having their own controllers. I'm sure any Chinese handhelds with analog inputs have them going straight to the SoC.
8) Saving on all of these components might not add up to that much in BOM cost, but it means a much simpler board with fewer layers. Which is of course a lot cheaper to manufacture and test.
I'd go on but honestly I'm at a loss because what I recall of Pandora's BOM looked like it included a huge chunk of money for "non-TI components".. and I had absolutely no idea what this could correspond to.
Now do I think a full-on Pandora clone, using the exact same hardware components, would be $150 in China? Probably not, although I think it'd be much less than $500 (probably less than $300). But how about a rough clone that had the same form factor/inputs and a high level of compatibility with generally higher performance and more memory? Assuming that Pandora's DSP doesn't suddenly become in vogue I'd say that's much more doable, albeit probably at the cost of worse battery life for the same sized battery. And yes, I think that could be done for $150.
Look at this teardown of Yinlips YDP-G18, you should see some of what I'm talking about:
http://dingoo-scene....ictures-of.html
Suffice it to say, the three main parts you listed - memory, LCD, and SoC, would cost around $5-10, $15-20 and $10-15 respectively (add $3-5 for internal SD card) for a typical design. Not 100 EUR. Even for the same components 100 EUR seems like a lot. I doubt Beagleboard-xM's PCB costs nearly as much as Pandora's does. Not a completely straight comparison since both contain components the other doesn't have, but the overall design complexity and volume seems similar. Of course they're using the regrettable CircuitCo. But there's no real question that you pay more doing this in Europe and getting everything you can from EBV. For instance, DM3730:
http://www.ebv.com/index.php?L=0&no_cache=1&id=58&tx_ebvsearch_pi1[qs]=1&ct_ref=u58&tx_indexedsearch[sword]=DM3730&tx_indexedsearch[results]=5&tx_indexedsearch[lang]=0&search_est=45c94ebeaf79e64628947d5854735515
32 EUR ($43) @ 500 vs:
http://www.findchips.com/avail?part=DM3730
Distributors selling it in the USA for $32 @ 500, or from TI directly:
http://www.ti.com/product/dm3730
$25.60 @ 1k
Is volume a part of the big savings for Chinese parts? Of course, but I really don't think it has the impact you say it does. I was quite alarmed to hear you say that your price break for 10,000 units would be spending half as much as you do now (which is what if I may ask.. 2000? 4000?) That would be an average across EVERYTHING, so some components would have to have a much higher price break. In quotes I've seen, even from real commodity distributors like Digi-Key or Mouser, you tend to get your biggest breaks by around 1000. You get some from that but it hits diminishing returns, and that's pretty much what you'd expect.. what economic reason would there be to get 1/4th the price on 100,000 units vs 2,000 (as you seemed to be saying before)? Of course a lot of components flat out can't be had in low quantities, and distributors won't carry them or won't even be offered them. But these Chinese components can typically all be had in lowish volumes, there are warehouses all over China and other countries that are wanting to get rid of stocks of them. And I really doubt all these Chinese companies are buying them in huge quantities, much less do I think any of these individual PMPs are selling like wildfire.
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Same here. I have to pay VAT but will get that back 2 months later.
All I have to pay is the VAT added to the end customer.
No import tax on the parts as well, and EBV gets them directly from the manufacturers.
This might be a big thing. Running a company in Europe is way more expensive than, for example, in US. And of course a lot more than in China.
Germany with all it's organization-and-whatever-fees makes things way more expensive as well.
And every company involved needs to cover these costs and make profit.
This probably adds A LOT.
I agree, that will also add costs.
We tried some cheap ones, but as the quality was horrible, we stuck to the $50 one.
Oh, right. Though PoP-NAND REALLY is a lot faster, and less powerhungry. Though no chinese company probably cares about that.
We also added some stuff like proper audio amps, as we tried to get a high quality
And both needing Atmels, which aren't cheap as well.
It would go down from 20 EUR to maybe 10 EUR, true.
Yes, I could guess it would be about $300 or less. No money conversion and less costs to run a company.
I'm at 260 - 270 EUR production costs right now, so $300 in China seems very likely.
Well, the Beagle-xM is only 6-layers, so the PCB is a bit simpler.
It's not as complex, and it's missing some very costly factors:
Assembly of the case (manpower in Germany is expensive), Battery, the LCD and custom-made LCD-Cables and nubs.
That saves a lot of costs here as well.
Well, my price is cheaper than both of those, if you discuss with distributors, you get way better prices.
Paying a few dollars more, but thankfully, not that much
Not only the parts, though they really MAKE a difference.
If you want to buy 10,000 or more OMAPs, you can talk directly with manufacturers like TI and get a way cheaper price than from a distributor.
No manufacturer will talk to you if you only want 1000.
Population and assembly also makes a huge difference.
It takes about a day to setup the population machine (load the parts, etc.) for a complex device like the Pandora.
1 machine hour is about 300 EUR, so you pay at least 2400 EUR just for setting everything up. Regardless whether you will produce 10, 1000 or 100,000 units.
Aditionally, ordering higher quantities will lower the production costs A LOT.
GC, for example, has about 50 employees. They all cost money.
When calculating their quotations, they also need to include some safety money. It might be they won't have many customers and not much work to do for a few weeks or even months. You never know.
That would cost them quite some money - and they need to be sure they will make enough money to compensate this.
Now, ordering 1000 Pandoras per month will keep their staff busy for about 1 week. However, they might calculate their costs to be sure they could survive another week without doing anything.
This would increase my costs.
If I order 10,000 Pandoras, their staff is busy for a full month. No need to worry about having to pay their staff without having work.
So no additional costs have to be included. Which makes things cheaper for me.
Stephane Hockenhull
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yes, its definitely overkill, this could be a cost-saving trick for P2
analog nubs don't need a high sampling rate, anything above 20Hz is more than good enough, especially if its pre-filtered in hardware to something close (but above) that frequency.
for speedy twitchy games like 2D fighting you got the digital D-Pad (even tho analog @ >= 20Hz still works fine)
could have done like another portable console and reused the mic/line inputs ADC as a cost saving measure.
you can even wire them so you can use both the (stereo) MIC/Line input and 1 nub at the same time if the nub is wired to output a DC offset on top of the MIC signal
voice input does not need low frequencies and you wont get any high-fidelity with a microphone that fits in a portable console to start with, the DC offset would give you at most a 30Hz signal if the user slammed the nubs back and forth, 50Hz tops if he's on something
and retrieve the nub status using a simple software low-pass filter.
this would NOT eat up a significant amount of CPU time, it would however complicate the drivers a bit.
altho I don't think using both the integrated microphone and nub is a frequent usage case.
FPS games being one, but encoding and decoding VOIP codec uses so much CPU its not realistic on the Pandora while playing a 3D FPS at the same time in networked multiplayer.
if it meant being able to take 20$ off the Pandora by using simpler ready-made nubs, whoever really wanted to try VOIP + Gaming could still get a 20$ USB headset with the money saved and break even.
slaeshjag
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
yes, its definitely overkill, this could be a cost-saving trick for P2
analog nubs don't need a high sampling rate, anything above 20Hz is more than good enough, especially if its pre-filtered in hardware to something close (but above) that frequency.
for speedy twitchy games like 2D fighting you got the digital D-Pad (even tho analog @ >= 20Hz still works fine)
OPT doesn't have the source code, it a proriatary blob from the nub company.
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Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Interesting; Wikipedia says that VAT is added to every sale regardless of if it's an end component or not. Guess it's wrong.
Sure, but I'm guessing that was 2008 (or earlier?). The one I looked at, for instance, was much newer than that. How many did you see, and did you keep looking? How was the quality horrible, and was it something that showed up in the data sheet?
The one I looked at is called CLAA048LA0BCT. Its power consumption is substantially worse than Pandora's (much of it is in the backlighting), but other than that it looked really nice on paper, with notably better response time (something I was looking for). I'd love to see some samples for it to get a feel for the quality. I had to look through many, many datasheets before I found a "maybe."
Nobody cares about it. That should be evident by the lack of anyone else offering NAND + mDDR packages, and that it was left behind for LPDDR2. And from a power and performance perspective, why should they? In most devices NAND is almost never accessed. Most people are happy using SD for most things on Pandora, and I doubt they'd care if it was a microSD internally instead of a NAND. It'd also probably simplify some potential bring-up issues.
That said, what comparisons/research did you do on this exactly?
We also added some stuff like proper audio amps, as we tried to get a high quality
True, although that just adds $2-3 or so (or is supposed to). I wouldn't necessarily write off the audio quality of codecs with builtin headphone amps, at least on paper they seemed decent - although probably don't supply nearly as much volume as Pandora's.
Well, they're cheap as far as microcontrollers go, so to speak, but it's kind of unfortunate needing them. I don't agree with Stephane Hockenhull that they should be removed entirely because I think 60+Hz sampling is important, but moreover think digital filtering/oversampling is potentially as well, and you don't want regular interrupts on a power-sensitive CPU if you can help it. But I'd much rather have it done by a single microcontroller, over a standard UART interface that can also be used to program it.
I was just comparing PCB cost, of course Pandora has additional expenses. Although the batteries are surprisingly cheap - makes you wonder why everyone is so tight on capacity.
My ideal handheld would have small analog sticks instead of those nubs. We were looking at CTS 254 (I believe from the same company that makes Caanoo's joystick.. but it's a larger one like the 252 or maybe 250). It's just a potentiometer so the electrical interface is very simple, as would any software support. No need to pay anyone to make anything or use a more proprietary design, you'd just need to design a cap.
But I know there are practical considerations that could pose problems for small analog sticks, and some people just don't like them (I'd vastly prefer it to Pandora's nubs, frankly)
Sure, but I was assuming you'd get similar breaks, percentage-wise.
Okay, but if 10,000 Pandoras really cost half as much per unit compared to 4,000 then your investment goal should have been for 10,000. Especially if you don't forsee a successor being released until at least 2013.
You do realise that the abbreviation VAT expands to "value added tax"? VAT does apply to every sale, but ... hold on: A highly simplified example (I'll use a VAT rate of 10% which will seem a little high, or very low, depending where you live.)
I buy 200€ worth of STUFF. With tax, I actually pay 220€.
I use all this STUFF to make a THING which I sell for 300€. Including VAT, my customer pays me 330€.
Now I owe the tax authorities the 30€ VAT I collected from my customer. But I can break out the documentation from my buying STUFF and show that I've already paid 20€ VAT on the STUFF which went into the THING. Therefore I have only 10€ still to pay, which is the full 10% VAT on the 100€'s worth of value I added to the STUFF by turning it into a THING. (National systems may differ on whether I simply pay only 10€ to the taxman, or pay 30€ and get 20€ back a while later.)
If my customer is a distributor who sells my THING on to an end user for 350€, he'll have to collect 35€ VAT on top of that, but since he's paid 30€ VAT through me already, he ultimately only delivers the remaining 5€ out of that sale to the tax authorities -- that's 10% of the 50€'s worth of value added by his distribution service.
So: Tax is paid on every step, but everyone except the end customer can offset the tax paid against the tax they collect when they make their sale. Critically, unlike you seem to imagine, taxes from earlier manufacturing steps aren't lumped into the price and taxed again, but kept separate from the product's price-without-tax throughout the whole production path it takes.
Better?
VAT was already explained by Znirk, the rest you said pretty much is true, so not much to say about that
The LCDs we tested were from 2008. Craig and Michael tested them, so I don't know what exact issue these had.
We're doing batches of 1,000 - not 4,000.
4,000 wouldn't have helped that much but would've needed about 1 Million EUR investments, which would've been pretty much impossible to get.
The LCDs we tested were from 2008. Craig and Michael tested them, so I don't know what exact issue these had.
We're doing batches of 1,000 - not 4,000.
4,000 wouldn't have helped that much but would've needed about 1 Million EUR investments, which would've been pretty much impossible to get.
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Yes, thank you ;P
Okay, I didn't realize.. just saw 4000 from the plans you gave out before. It's a shame 1M EUR isn't obtainable. I guess Pandora suffers a lot vs other manufacturing attempts by not having "normal" amounts of investment money behind it. It'd be great if a moderately well off person with a similar vision entered a market like this and properly funded things.
craigix
Mega GP Mania
The LCD in the Pandora is available in several versions, from AA to something like F.
The AA one is the one in the Pandora. It's the most expensive one.
We sourced a cheap $15 version (presumably the F version) and it was all washed out and horrible.
It's probably what goes in to all these Chinese PMPs.
---
In regards to how China make things so cheap, aside from the complex part (the SoC) most of their systems use entirely their own components which are often a fraction of the cost of the western equivalents.
I'm not entirely sure of how legal that is, but that's what they do.
The AA one is the one in the Pandora. It's the most expensive one.
We sourced a cheap $15 version (presumably the F version) and it was all washed out and horrible.
It's probably what goes in to all these Chinese PMPs.
---
In regards to how China make things so cheap, aside from the complex part (the SoC) most of their systems use entirely their own components which are often a fraction of the cost of the western equivalents.
I'm not entirely sure of how legal that is, but that's what they do.
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