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  • Pissedoffyouth - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link

    Thanks for this Andrei, I have a couple questions:

    SDIO - not being DMA does that mean WiFi transfers use a lot of CPU?

    And also, do most current SoC share SDIO channels with eMMC or is this limited to mediatek? I know the mt6589 shared this and so under heavy WiFi loads flash performance suffered. Is this the same for the, say, snapdragon 800?
  • saratoga4 - Monday, March 2, 2015 - link

    It means that some processor must manually perform memory copies between different device address spaces, although not necessarily (and probably not) the main host CPU. With DMA you can basically just setup buffers that are shared and let the other device stream data in/out.
  • g1011999 - Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - link

    Actually most sdmmc/sdio controller come with DMA engine. The most inefficient part of sdmmc/sdio is its protocol design(half duplex, frequent controller register access and interrupt design).
  • Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - link

    Yes, SDIO in past phones are connected through one of the channels on the SoC's eMMC controller. I'm not sure about MediaTek but this shouldn't have caused a bottleneck though.
  • David1972 - Monday, March 9, 2015 - link

    Hi, Andrei "The BCM4358 was the first such chip to take advantage of this switch", BCM4335 and BCM4339 supported PCIe as well. why do you mention those products (together with BCM4358) as the first time that PCIe became the main interface outside?

    Dave
  • Udo_d - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link

    Andrei, thanks for an interesting post.
    The Broadcom press release claims:
    "Fast mode switch between RSDB and 2x2 MIMO modes".
    I suppose that this means that RSDB only supports 1x1 mode simultaneous.
    Was that your understanding from the demo?

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