"Underclocked" 84mhz response from Orange

[Guest Firaas]

Spoke to the O guy yesterday and mentioned how a couple of people found that the chip in the phone showed up as 84mhz, when the processor was advertised as 133.

He said that there were two chips in the phone, a 133mhz chip for apps, and an 84mhz chip for the phone side of stuff - and neither chip is actually underclocked :lol:

[Guest mrjuglas]

wow! well that is news! Sounds like he knows what he's talking about too, surprising that no-one here figured that out yet though

[Guest Firaas]

Sounds like he knows what he's talking about

Yeah - he went into a lot of detail, describing the chip models specifically and stuff.

[Guest Crispy]

Interesting ... Dual CPU ... who would have thought ...

[Guest midnight]

why the hell would a processor for the phone side of things require 84mhz?

[Guest midnight]

in fact, just thought, if theres any truth in this that may explain part of the crappy battery life :wink:

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

(It was the MS bloke with the Intel ref phone Firaas ;p)

[Guest glynton]

i think PDAs and smartphones have about three processors in them, but i can remember reading in several places that Intel have developed a new chip that does the work of all the other chips and is smaller than any one of the chips on its own, and uses a fraction of the battery. But this is new technology, not to be found on smartphone, however it's a promising glimpes of what's to come, imagine a smartphone as light and cute as the T68i?!?!?!!!

Glynton

[Guest Firaas]

(It was the MS bloke with the Intel ref phone Firaas ;p)

Not this again. It was the Orange guy who said it, the one who told me we wouldn't get upgrades to the SPVx! (Not that I need one now ;P)

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

But thats nothing to do with what you originally said in this thread...

[Guest Firaas]

But thats nothing to do with what you originally said in this thread...

You what? :lol:

[Guest wirefree90]

One processor for WinCe

and one for the GSM Radio.

:lol:

[Guest Crispy]

hehe ... it actually did say dual procesor on the Danish Orange website: http://orange.dk/spv/specifikationer/

[Guest Hax]

And in the spec for chip (sorry can't find link at the mo, writing on SPV but have posted it before, back in December(ish) time)

IIRC, there's an ARM7 for the GSM side and an ARM9 for the Windows and app side

Hax

[Guest spacemonkey]

I'm pretty sure that it's not dual CPU, what I think it is is dual cores in a single cpu chip.

Basically the aim is rather than just giving the phone a processor, you need a chip to do all the signal processing for audio/radio, and your processing and your other functions, like bus control/bios etc.

From my understanding, it's similar with what intel have packaged up for their refernce design/mitac mio. It's a single chip solution incorporating a XScale core for all normal cpu functions, a signal processor, and some other stuff all in one chip.

[Guest Hax]

I guess it really depends on how you define CPU. Both of the ARM cores are on the same piece of silicon and so there is only one chip.

However, there are two processors within that one chip, but obviously, you can't have two "Central" Processing Units :lol: However, they will (I hope!) work fairly independently from each other, possibly sharing common RAM, so in that respect, you could consider it a "dual-processor" chip, but with one more-or-less being a slave to the other, it is not dual-processor in the same way as a dual proessor Pentium IV type PC, they don't *both* work on number crunching and general app running at the same time. The ARM7 (the GSM side) is more of a peripheral to the ARM9

Hax

[Guest vampyre69]

Wow a dual processor phone, I'm going to perform a multi system intallation and assign the phone processor to also accept dual boot string commands so I can then run 2 OS's on my SPV.

Then I plan to overclock them to around 500mhz each and use a deepfreeze offboard cooling system for the chips!!!

Then if it's all ok Iwill sell the idea on ebay for £1000

er if your taking me for an idiot at this point, let me tell you I am just kidding :wink:

[Guest jtsaint]

How can you have two bus speeds running on the same cpu even it has two cores. If it has the same bus speed then how do they cope with different multiplying factors that determin the cpu Mhz speed?

[Guest Hax]

Of course we're taking you for an idiot at this point - you could easily sell the idea on eBay for at least £50000 ;)

Right after you sell you perpetual energy methods too :lol:

Hax

[Guest Hax]

How can you have two bus speeds running on the same cpu even it has two cores. If it has the same bus speed then how do they cope with different multiplying factors that determin the cpu Mhz speed?

Now we didn't say there were two bus speeds - just two processor cores running at different speeds - quite different, and relatively straight forward!

Core speed != bus speed :lol:

HTH,

Hax

[Guest madu]

If I may add this VERY simplified comparison:

It is like a pentium with a mathematic co-processor working alongside just to perform mathematical calculations and not use the main one for that rubbish.

Another simplification: MMX is an addon (allowing extra, enhanced sets of instructions) and is not used by OS really, but when you play games (ie use radio function of the phone) it is used fully.

Basically, it performs a specific set of instructions for a particular part of phone functions. But the OS is using the main 'processor' for PDA software part..

PS: Now if I do sound like a complete muppet, please correct me, but it seemed to me that it would be a way to compare the buggers...

PPS: And yes, I have no clue, but I've taken these things apart and I know that they can be especially hot if you are testing one for a few minutes and didn't bother to stick on a radiator/fan. Cuppa tea anyone? [expensive tea]

[Guest Crispy]

Then the interesting question arise ... Is it posible to utilize both procesors to run the same app? ... If posible that would allow for some far more demanding programs to be developed (eg. Gameboy advance emulator!!!) and who would'n want that :lol:

Any thoughts?

[Guest Hax]

That's an excellent analogy Madukrainian (especially the maths co-pro one!) - nice one - next time I'll try not to babble quite so much :lol:

Hax

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Hmm, the math co-processor analogy occured to me as well. I was only 99% sure though and didnt have time to double check, so i left it at the risk of being flamed hehe.

I'll act on my intiative next time ;p

[Guest Playdoh]

The SPV (and Tanager I think) use the TI OMAP 710 chip which includes a ARM7 DSP for GSM/GPRS and an ARM9 for application processing

See http://focus.ti.com/graphics/omap/omap_020603.pdf

for a detailed overview. Interesting to see that GPS and Bluetooth are noted on the diagram as potential IO capabilities of this chipset :shock:

Also interesting to read the chart towards the end of that PDF where it notes stuff like 2D graphics and faster memory interfaces are standard on the 200Mhz chips ;)