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Comment by paulpan | Hacker News Reader

Tensor SOC seems pretty impressive on paper, will be curious about how it benchmarks and performs in real-life. The Pixel 5 with its "mid-tier" SOC (Snapdragon 765G) was actually pretty good thanks to the software optimizations.

Bigger news is Qualcomm being left out. Will they go the way of Intel by incentivizing their customers build their own SOCs?

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The bigger problem with Qualcomm is that they're primarily the reason why devices only got a two year span of updates and poor support. Each board built for each phone still had to get the software support starting with Qualcomm before it could be built with new source for updates. Outside that 2 year window, every device OEM had to support the hardware themselves. That's why new phones with older SOCs never got any updates at all. (Read up on Project Mainline as one attempt to mitigate this problem.)

I'm not surprised at all that OEMs are moving towards own/custom SOCs or other sources. Been seeing more Motorola phones with Mediatek socs, Samsung has Exynos, Google now with Tensor.

> The bigger problem with Qualcomm is that they're primarily the reason why devices only got a two year span of updates and poor support.

All Pixels running Qualcomm got Android N+3.

Pixels running Tensor will get, let me check the announcement, ah yes, Android N+3.

What are you talking about? Pixel 2 was releases Oct 2017, end of support was Dec 2020. So, about 3 years. Pixel 1 was the same, 3 years. For the later ones, still supported, let's see. Tensor based ones will get at least 5 years.

I've been playing around with the edge TPU on a coral.ai board. It's very impressive - I'm able to do real time object detection at tens of frames per second vs one frame every 15 or so seconds on my CPU.

BTW, this sounded surprising to me, so I went to check it out. According to YOLOv4 GitHub, i7-7700 can only do 4 FPS of detection. For comparison, tuned version on Jetson Xavier (NVidia dev board) does 40FPS.

https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet

https://github.com/indra4837/yolov4_trt_ros

Yes, that sounds about right.

I was using YOLOv3 on a i7-1065G7 (laptop) which probably explains the 4 FPS vs 0.25 FPS difference on CPU performance.

I put the project down for a while because I got busy. I really should revive it.

> Will they go the way of Intel by incentivizing their customers build their own SOCs?

Intel still only have one legitimate competitor in the x86 space and they can at least get a bit of the business they're losing back through their emergent FAB outsourcing division. They also seem to be throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and some of it might stick!

Qualcomm seems to be keeping their head just above water. I suspect that's going to change quite rapidly though.

Every generation the gap between Snapdragon, Dimensity, and Exynos gets narrower and narrower. However, this coming generation might finally do them in. The Dimensity 2000 looks like it's going to be a monster and the next generation Exynos is about to pick up some RDNA 2 IP, so who knows what that crazy thing is going to do.

> will be curious about how it benchmarks

Benchmarks are meaningless and they also took the time to mention that in the presentation too. As you mention, the Pixel 5 did fine even with the mid-tier chipset. The reality is that phones are rarely CPU bound, and most of the heavy tasks are done by specialized cores anyways.

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