Gadgetory

it's with great pleasure that I am able to spend some time with a very special friend of ours the man who works for arm his name is James Bruce and he's the head mobile strategies for arm and here we are mobile world congress from Barcelona and we're going to ask some tough questions ok not so tough cuz actually let's just talk about armors company and let's just talk about how things have led up to now so I mean as you know arm is about 23 years oh yes and really our focus rather than being a processor company we came up with this unique business model where we actually licensed the processor to other chip companies and what this means is that you have great companies like Qualcomm and video Samson broadcom I could keep on going as 200 of them and it really allows them to innovate they can use a standards-based core with access to a great ecosystem such as Android but then it allows them to do their own unique SOC s and I think the really exciting thing from the perspective of consumers perspective of people who really care about their gadgets is that you end up with devices that's all unique that are different rather than just taking one SOC and everyone doing different plastics around it what happens is that you see different solutions different products coming out of that and that different price points I think down here we've got some great examples so the first one we have is a tablet from China this is a quad-core cortex a7 from allwinner it has a IPS screen running at 2k resolution and I retina display retina display yeah and as I mentioned had a two hundred fifty dollar price point and has for the price point and the fact that it's just using cortex a7 has a great user experience have the browser and I bad with the same display that's right yeah and this actually comes into our next device here which I really like and this is the base around rod 87 and it's using the media tech parts and it's got a very nice display it's got a great user interface very fluid and this is also coming up coming into the market a very sort of mid-level price point so there's a number of users whether not lucky like for example we are in the US where handsets are heavily subsidized where they want a great user experience but perhaps don't want to spend six hundred dollars for us and devices like this great when first one and this one James um price point for that is hasn't quite come to market but I would expect it to be around that's 250 300 dollars so that meditation did this one was almost previously inexpensive that's right so this particular one sells for seventy dollars unsubsidized how many dollars but if you want to go lower that's actually another handset based around the same chipset as spreadtrum of life selling for forty-eight dollars unsubsidized in China yes and that really shows the differences that you're getting the sort of scale of solutions and then if you like me if you're a sort of gadget geek and what they sort of ultimate and and everything to our games of course I wouldn't be doing this job otherwise yes then what we've got here is a demonstration of the Exynos 5 octa showing off big listen the Exynos 5 octa yeah can you speak a little bit about this for us absolutely so it has eight cores but rather than a cause being the same size it's actually four little pores and poor big ones and the reason is is a lot of tasks actually don't need that home so you run on the little paws and then when you need the Pullman it's able to switch out to the big paws when needed as demonstrated here go back to the littles so you actually get the best of both world to get the spray hi battery efficiency and very high performance so if you look at things like the quad cortex a15 devices if you look at benchmarks like deep bench they're actually approaching benchmarks that you see in a typical laptop and someone's home today true so it's going to be really exciting when products like this getting to your hands for the introduction there's been a lot of speculation you know about the octa yeah and a lot of consumers at least in our commenting and on our forums and everything is in when it one of the core is going to solve and in reality are we actually going to see octa-core in 2013 so eun devices so you're going to see optical but you gotta remember this is not octa-core like quad not only conventional said no we are we understand yeah i think our readers in our viewers that android 30 days certainly savvy enough to appreciate the difference between a traditional a coprocessor and a big little yeah completely it's to architectures working simultaneously that's right and so I think really you're going to see no increase in the number of the same cause but what you're going to see is actually people using more cause to actually deliver great performance or greater power efficiency in the next step is really GP GPU compute mm-hmm and I'm sure a lot of your readers have the nexus 10 which has our Marley t6o powerful SOC exactly and that actually have a multi 604 has been news now for things like image processing image editing video editing and so you're going to see this trend of more and more cause because it really allows to allows you to have the right call for the job at hand this is interesting can you explain to me just briefly why Apple with our iPad and I know you enjoy a special relationship arm does with Apple why they're able to push up so much performance with yet 512 megabytes of RAM and low clock frequencies and what I view as previous generation reference instruction sets so I mean obviously I can't comment on Apple directly and but I think you've really got to look at it's very much when you look at any product like this from Firefox OS to other products such as windows phone to android it's very dependent upon the OS how its design early yet and how much memory is oh yeah so it's very dependent upon just the fundamental OS and what you're doing with it viously the language that is coated in you know it's very different to intervene java-based it presents certain you know architectural challenges you know in terms of efficiency I think I mean androids a great OS and yeah and but also it's a very powerful OS with a lot of multitasking exactly and I think that's one of the great things about Android you've got great handsets like the note 2 other handsets 2 gigabytes and the real multitasking environment and I'm sure you've seen the videos in the web where note 2 has been used as sort of desktop replacements I have a no to India change well oh yeah it's extremely productive you know and i think the exciting thing is that you're going to see much more powerful handsets coming out this year so as yet as your readership is sort of true sort of Android your fans you're going to have some really exciting devices via smartphones or tablets in your hands so let's talk about the elephant in the room which is Intel and they're trying to play a lot of ketchup in the x86 you know just in terms of the economy scaled yeah they've killed in their very profitable but x86 processor are diminishing year after year arm in the server space and the TDP w vs you know the TV BTW that intel's able to produce so i think what people have got to keep in mind is that fundamentally if you look at let's say the atom processor in a medfield handset okay vs1 cortex a9 performance wise they're roughly the same they deliver the same benchmarks you can always find one benchmark that makes the other guys look better and vice versa love them but the key thing is is that the cortex a9 is almost four times smaller than the yeah and what that means is that fundamentally your SOC is a cheaper fundamentally more power efficient and I think the other great thing is that really it's about buying cool devices and if you look at what x86 has done is brought nothing new to the market they have brought enough you're a long time not any new super phones and if you look at all the cool devices even you know at great price points or great performance it's boats arm-based because we really allow people to innovate well and you have a lot of active relationships with a lot of very innovative and forward-thinking companies so tell me this ten years from now James we have a device that perhaps is this size there can really just be our everything or is it coming sooner than that it's coming much sooner so I think you're really looking at the point in let's say two years to two years where it will have really if you look at the Exynos 5 octa and other parts such as the Tegra 4 they're almost at lap top performance through this year so 2014-2015 really the only limit is the size of your screen and if you plug into wirelessly connect two monitors bluetooth keyboard mouse then it can replace your desktop laptop and the last question that I'll ask you sir is you know the it's really incredible the IP instruction sets that you're revealing and that you're working with partners on actively improving everything yeah but everything is improving it people can argue 82 142 two hundred percent per year you know the performance yeah but battery life is only increasing a five percent per year so what can we do in terms of that regard so I think there's two things to keep in mind certainly what you're seeing is we're looking at technologies like big little which we talked about GPU compute all there to improve efficiency I'm going to cheat and we going to say I get that beautiful so what we've got here is a 14 nanometer test way for 14 14 nanometer FinFET on there so empty oh no actually IBM Wow oh they're scary so really advanced technology that helps on the power to as well yeah and it's really incredible but i think the other critical thing to keep in mind is if you look let's say ten years ago when you had that wonderful nokia s40 handset unless you a snake addict it was very hard to use the battery through the day because you just couldn't do much with it you can take to make very different now James make a phone call and now you just do so much on your phone because it's very much your primary compute device but certainly as you look at new screen technologies technologies like big little the other stuff that our partners are doing your battery life is going to get better galaxy s4 octo-core i would let samson on to that one you're no fun just joking thank you so much for your time sir okay right I really it's an honor meeting you as well James all right thanks so much android authority here live from Mobile World Congress hearing straight from the man himself it's a real pleasure and an honor I'm kind of having nerd struck right now and we'll stay in touch with a white no you know we're here for you guys delivering the freshest finest Android news every day thank you very much