Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

thehistoryofcomputing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#11

Post by lxgr »

Unfortunately my memories of Qualcomm devices and technologies are a bit less fond.

At least when I was using Android devices, their CPU and GPU performance was always lagging, sometimes quite heavily, behind competitors. As far as I know, the main selling point was always the baseband part of their SoC designs, not the application processor. (Having both in a single SoC supposedly can save a lot of power and definitely does save money in many low and mid range phone designs.)

Their proprietary CDMA standards have been a source of frustration as a GSM phone user when traveling to some countries (although CDMA at the time seemed very innovative and was available before UMTS) as well.

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#12

Post by chasil »

lxgr wrote: post #11

Unfortunately my memories of Qualcomm devices and technologies are a bit less fond. At least when I was using Android devices, their CPU and GPU performance was always lagging, sometimes quite heavily, behind competitors. As far as I know, the main selling point was always the baseband part of their SoC designs, not the application processor. (Having both in a single SoC supposedly can save a lot of power and definit…

Was this Krait or Kryo?

...this article betrays its age.

"Qualcomm has an ARM Architectural License and uses the ARM instruction set to create their own CPUs. The most recent incarnation is known as Krait."

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#13

Post by saddlerustle »

david-gpu wrote: post #10
saddlerustle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos

I was part of the GPU handheld IP group within AMD that was acquired by Qualcomm and remained in Qualcomm for several years after the acquisition. You are correct about the Adreno 200 being a trimmed down version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360. That shipped before the acquisition by Qualcomm. However, I can also confirm that the GP is right: Adreno 300, which is the first product that we shipped after the acquisi…

Ah I was always curious about this. Thanks for the history!

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#15

Post by vvanders »

david-gpu wrote: post #10
saddlerustle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos

I was part of the GPU handheld IP group within AMD that was acquired by Qualcomm and remained in Qualcomm for several years after the acquisition. You are correct about the Adreno 200 being a trimmed down version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360. That shipped before the acquisition by Qualcomm. However, I can also confirm that the GP is right: Adreno 300, which is the first product that we shipped after the acquisi…

Oh man, the eDRAM on X360 makes so much more sense now. I always wondered why that was the case but I wasn't as close to the graphics side of things when I was working in gamedev.

GPUs are always something where people have... strong opinions about. That said having spent a bunch of time with the Adrenos they were pretty solid embedded GPUs and watching the generational leaps from 100/200/300/400 was a ton of fun. The GPU group over there at QC had some sharp people and were always great to work with(at least from my exposure).

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#17

Post by mastax »

secperkinsstan wrote: post #16
quantumduck wrote: post #4

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity also uses a commerical off the shelf snapdragon mobile processor (820 I believe).

wait do silicon based chips work in the temperature and pressure of the martian surface?

Yes. From what I gather you wouldn't use commercial grade chips, the standard epoxy encapsulation doesn't work well at crazy temperatures and pressures. Ceramic/metal packages are preferred.

See: https://www.ti.com/applications/industrial/aerospace-defense...

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#18

Post by rootsudo »

Really happy for this, most people don't know about qualcomm. It was quite fun exploring the old stories of phreaking and discovering what still worked post 00' on CDMA devices. To my surprise, everything was basically the same to an extent and there still exists a nice community for this.

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#19

Post by sephamorr »

secperkinsstan wrote: post #16
quantumduck wrote: post #4

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity also uses a commerical off the shelf snapdragon mobile processor (820 I believe).

wait do silicon based chips work in the temperature and pressure of the martian surface?

It's actually not crazy on Ingenuity: vacuum really isn't an issue for most chips, the epoxy packages are totally okay from 0-1atm. The temperatures are also kept benign - One of the advantages of being in a near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere is that heat transfer is very slow. Ingenuity keeps to a fairly narrow (-20 to 60C iirc) temperature range even without substantial power spent on heaters. It gets warm during a heat-soak event after flying, and on the cold side, it doesn't get below the temps allowed for the li-ion battery. Note that it isn't designed to survive a bad martian winter, though this is mostly due to decreased power generation rather than lower temperatures.

Re: Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

#20

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

david-gpu wrote: post #10
saddlerustle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how true that is given how closely the Adreno 2xx ISA matches Xenos

I was part of the GPU handheld IP group within AMD that was acquired by Qualcomm and remained in Qualcomm for several years after the acquisition. You are correct about the Adreno 200 being a trimmed down version of the Xenos GPU from the XBox 360. That shipped before the acquisition by Qualcomm. However, I can also confirm that the GP is right: Adreno 300, which is the first product that we shipped after the acquisi…

Thank you for sharing these stories.

>This amalgamation of people led to a ton of internal conflict

This hits dangerously close to home, if I hadn't experienced this a thousand times.

Post reply on HN