Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/qualcomm-from-satellites-to-cdma-to-snapdragons

33 20 4 years ago

The article forgot to mention that their Adreno GPUs were IP acquired from former ATI, now AMD (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon)

If you ever feel like you made a bad financial bet, remember that AMD nearly bankrupted itself by spending too much money on buying ATI in 2006, and in 2009 sold Quallcomm their Imageon (now Adreno) mobile GPU division they got from the ATI acquisition, exactly when the smartphone boom kicked off the mobile SoC gold rush that made Quallcomm so rich. It's like shooting yourself in both feet. Twice. I wonder if whoever was at the helm of AMD back then managed to find other jobs in the industry after that.

my123• 4 years ago

It was partially from their acquisition.

Adreno started by using the fixed function blocks from the Imageon acquisition from AMD but combined them with the programmable blocks of the Qualcomm Qshader GPU architecture.

saddlerustle2• 4 years ago

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

stefan_• 4 years ago

It's a nice theory but I think it's the integrated Qualcomm modem that lets them peddle their rather mediocre ARM processors and GPU.

quantumduck• 4 years ago

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

secperkinsstan• 4 years ago

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

mastax• 4 years ago

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...

sephamorr• 4 years ago

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.

Damogran6• 4 years ago

Who remembers qualcomm for their email client?

voxadam• 4 years ago

Ah, the good old days of Eudora. I'd forgotten about it being a Qualcomm product.

Justin_K• 4 years ago

Oh wow I read your comment and heard the do do do Da duh duh sound.

Dracophoenix• 4 years ago

The source code is available from the Computer History Museum

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

klelatti• 4 years ago

Broadcom was growing into a behemoth. Many of their designs sent from stand-alone chips to being a small part of a SoC, or system on a chip. Suddenly, cross-licensing the ARM gave Qualcomm the ability to make full SoCs.

Surely the Broadcom and the ‘cross licensing’ are errors here?

lxgr• 4 years ago

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.

chasil• 4 years ago

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."

rootsudo• 4 years ago

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.

Qualcomm: From Satellites to CDMA to Snapdragons

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