The Cellular Telecommunication Industry Association concluded its wireless show in Las Vegas on March 25th, and provided the tech community with a couple of interesting platforms to ponder over and analyze. In this article, we will go over two major announcements and their ramifications for the smartphone industry. The first one is a path breaking product, while the second one is yet another iPhone wannabe. However, it is really the silicon behind these two products which deserves analysis.

Sprint is the leading US wireless service provider as far as the race to next-generation high bandwidth wireless data infrastructure (4G) is concerned. After merging with Clearwire, it adopted WiMAX as its 4G strategy, while the others hopped on to the LTE / HSPA+ bandwagon. Though none of these technologies have gained widespread acceptance in the US yet (due to the lack of infrastructure / devices capable of utilizing these technologies), the 2010 CTIA show saw the introduction of a smartphone which could represent the first step towards making 4G a reality for the American consumer. As the first US smartphone to take advantage of WiMAX, the announcement of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G is indeed a landmark. 

The capabilities of the innovations on display in the HTC EVO depend largely on the quality of the WiMAX networks and the loads it would be subjected to. On the other hand, the application processor in a smartphone is directly responsible for the quality of user interaction. It is in this area that the Samsung Galaxy S scores. With an user interface bearing an uncanny resemblance to the iPhone, it is excusable if one pushes it to the side as yet another knockoff, albeit, from a reputable brand. However, a little digging reveals that the app processor used is the Samsung S5PC110, the next generation version of the S5PC100. If you'll remember, a derivative of the S5PC100 was used in the iPhone 3GS.

In the rest of this article, we will analyze these two platforms and finally draw some conclusions as to where the smartphone silicon market is headed, based on the products which went on display at the 2010 CTIA wireless show.

HTC introduced the first (and till 2010 CTIA, the only) smartphone with WiMAX support (HTC MAX 4G) in Russia in 2009. So, it came as no surprise that Sprint chose HTC as its partner to bring out the first US WiMAX device in a smartphone form factor. Based on the tried and true Snapdragon platform (which also happens to be the brains behind the Google Nexus One), it is not the application processor which takes the laurels here, but the radio chipset used. Since the application processor also plays an important role in the end user experience, let us take a short detour to analyze the pros and cons of the Snapdragon platform used here before looking into the winner in the radio chipset.

The real winner in the HTC EVO 4G is a relatively unknown semiconductor company, Beceem Communication. A provider of chips for 4G communication, the company exclusively powers the Sprint WiMAX network. It is believed in industry circles that the HTC EVO 4G's WiMAX support is powered by the Beceem BCSM250 (which is already a part of some of the other 4G equipment supplied for utilizing Sprint's network). Beceem, along with Motorola, also announced plans to support both WiMAX and LTE standards in the BCS500 introduced at the 2010 Mobile World Congress. All in all, Beceem looks set to be a dominant force in the US radio chipset market for 4G devices in the near future.

Update: It looks like the WiMAX baseband chip in the HTC EVO 4G isn't made by Beceem but rather Sequans Communication.

The 2010 CTIA wireless show also saw the introduction of Samsung's latest Android phone, the Galaxy S. As many people have already noticed, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the iPhone in terms of the user interface (despite running Android). However, its specs happen to be actually much more impressive, both on the inside and the outside. With a 4" AMOLED screen and a 1 GHz processor, it is indeed better than the iPhone 3GS hardware wise. As already noted in the opening remarks, this phone uses an app processor that is likely very similar to Apple's A4. Engadget covered the launch at CTIA and shot this video showing the similarity that the phone shares with the iPhone 3GS.

Looking into the specs of the S5PC110 a little more, one realizes how much it shares in common with the purported specs of the Apple A4. They were both fabricated in the Samsung foundry, and the Cortex-A8 core in both these chips are capable of running at 1 GHz. In fact, it is believed that Samsung and Apple both utilized the services of Intrinsity to harden the Cortex-A8 core to enable it to run at 1 GHz in Samsung's 45nm process. The process of hardening a core involves optimization of the layout and placement of the components of the processor in order to improve the speed of operation as well as reduce the power consumption.

 

Semiconductor companies which integrate ARM's designs into their products usually take it as a hard macro from the foundry. This saves them the licensing costs, and can act as an incentive for the fabless company to choose a particular manufacturer over another. However, some companies may decide to devote time and effort to optimize the original design in layout and not rely on the foundry to do it for them. This is usually done by big companies which can spare the manpower and the associate costs. Usually they also have an architectural license, which gives them the freedom to even modify the pipeline behavior, and not just the layout. Examples of such companies are Marvell and Qualcomm. Sometimes, the hardening of the macro may be outsourced to another firm. These dedicated firms do a better job than the foundy themselves (since the latter may be able to devote only a small amount of resources for the purpose of hardening). Intrinsity is one such dedicated firm which has been employed by both Samsung and Apple (through the Samsung foundry) to harden ARM's version of Cortex-A8. Their version is used in both the Apple A4 and the S5PC110.

 

The GPU core in the S5PC110 as well as the Apple A4 is Imagination Technology's PowerVR SGX540. This product line has already proved its worth in the previous iPhones, and the SGX540 in the S5PC110 promises more than 90 million triangles per second of graphics performance. This is more than four times the performance of the graphics engine in the Snapdragon chip present in HTC EVO 4G. Even users who do not play games will find that this performance translates to a responsive and pleasing user interface.

 

The major difference between the Apple A4 and the S5PC110 is the fact that the latter can decode 720p HD videos as evidenced in the video above. It is possible that Apple decided to go with the decode acceleration provided by the NEON engine in Cortex-A8 (which would explains the complete lack of HD support in the iPad), while Samsung decided to go with their custom HD decode accelerator (Some suspect that it is a member of the PowerVR VXD family which enables the HD decode in S5PC110). We will get to know further about this platform when it starts shipping.

 

Why does the S5PC110 deserve a place in this roundup? The sole reason is that the next iPhone is probably based on a variant of this app processor. In effect, we are being provided with a sneak peek at the hardware capabilities of the next iPhone hardware platform.

We looked at two interesting silicon platforms introduced at the 2010 CTIA wireless show. The wireless radio chipset from Sequans shows the coming to fruition of a nascent market opportunity, but the competition in that space is bound to heat up soon with the established companies such as Qualcomm becoming ready to introduce their own offerings.

If Sprint can deliver excellent performance on its WiMAX network, the HTC EVO 4G may end up being the Android phone to get.

The app processor used in the Samsung Galaxy S is a precursor to what we will be seeing in this year's iPhone line product. Subtle variations in this app processor have already been introduced by Samsung for other product lines such as smartbooks and media streamers. The competition in this space is becoming more and more interesting with the capabilities of the various competing products.

At present, there is little separating the OMAP4000, Marvell ARMADA 610, Qualcomm Snapdragon and the Samsung S5PC110. A detailed analysis of the various smartphone app processor platforms will appear soon on AnandTech. In the meanwhile, we will continue to bring you a roundup of the interesting hardware platforms getting introduced in the upcoming trade shows. Stay tuned!