Sunday, December 9, 2018

Spreadtrum - now Unisoc - has finally started its upward journey with its SC9863A chip. Either it's already there or it's now very close to the point where its cheap chips will finally become decent enough or good enough that they'll finally start to be incorporated by mainstream smartphone and device manufacturers.

  • There's no other purely ARM Cortex-A55 SoC on the market currently. Which is surprising considering there were/are several purely ARM Cortex-A53 chips, and A55 is the successor to A53. But the point here is that there was a market gap that Unisoc's chip has filled - at least until others release pure A55 processors.
  • Good GPU.
  • Though use of 28 nm manufacturing process is a shame [they should've used at least 16 nm and preferably 14 nm], all 8 cores are A55 and not A57/A72/A73/A75/A76, so power consumption shouldn't be too high. Still, had they used 14 nm, the chip's power consumption would've become a strong point.
  • 1.6 GHz isn't stellar of course, but it's certainly good enough for casual usage, especially if the OS is a pure version devoid of unnecessary layers/skins [and optimally compiled and configured].
  • The stunning success that MediaTek has achieved in the last 1-2 years, and particularly with its Helio P60 SoC should serve as a cautionary tale for Qualcomm. It's only a matter of time before Unisoc has its own Helio P60 moment. Obviously it's tough to digest that the excellent Helio X30 failed.
  • Obviously Unisoc needs to market itself and its products better. For example, the webpage for its older SC9832E product highlights "VoLTE, ViLTE, VoWiFi", but the page for its latest chip doesn't, making you feel like it might be missing these.



Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Sunday, January 14, 2018