Sony Switches To Its Own Processor For Handhelds

Pointing to this Associated Press story carried by the Miami Herald, Jorkapp writes "Sony has announced that they will be using Processors manufactured by themselves in their next generation of CLIE handhelds, which are due to ship this Semptember. This is only the first step though, as Sony is planning to use its own line of processors for the next generation of Playstation systems. This new processor will give users 16 hours of battery life (impressive!) and the ability to play video at a smooth 30fps." And jake writes with a link to a story at mobilemag.com which also describes the new handhelds (the UX50 was mentioned the other day), and says "both the CLIE UX50 and UX40 handhelds will be available through American retailers in September for about $700 and $600, respectively, but can be pre-ordered now through Sony's website."

News: 10-15-2003

Sony puts AMD and Intel out of business! Competition is always great..

Five-to-TEN hours of video!

The story says you get double the battery life with an external battery pack. Man. This thing would be sweet for watching movies on airplanes!

proprietary hardware

Even if the hardware is better, proprietary hardware is bad. It limits the choices of what you can do with the devicce you own. It goes beyond the "can I run linux on it", hell a valid question would be "am I able to run windows on it?"

Beta was technically better than VHS. Look what won. Popularity is important. (possibly a bad example, I had a valid point, but I might have lost it to inebriation)

Re:proprietary hardware

No, I've repeated this many more times than I care to, Beta was not better than VHS. Beta tapes, while technically superior in quality (and only marginally so), were only one hour long, whereas VHS tapes, clunky as they were, were two hours long, capable of recording an entire feature-length movie unattended. Eventually, the length of a Beta tape would be extended as the standard was revised and perfected, but by this time the damage had already been done and VHS had taken hold. It was this fundamental difference that led to Beta losing the video format war, not some silly "open standard."

Do you own a Playstation2? That's got all sorts of proprietary hardware in it. Can you run Linux on it? Yes, you can.

Re:proprietary hardware

Proprietary doesn't equal non-standard. I would assume it would have to maintain compatibility with the current generation instruction sets because I can't see Sony doing away with the Palm OS.

Look at the PocketPC...3 different processor types and they all run Windows OS. Much the same way that Linux can run on PPC, Sun and Intel chips.

So long as compatibility is maintained and it supports the broadest range of instructions, more power to them.

As for MS or Linux on a handheld...WHY? Sure, I'm all for it for those who want that, bu honestly the Palm OS is one of the best handheld OS's on the market. The old PSION OS was great too. I haven't played with the Sharp Linux handheld, but every MS handheld I've used is power-hungry and a memory hog.

soapbox

One last thing. Just because you own the device, doesn't mean it HAS to support user changes. If you don't like the way it comes, dob't buy it! You don't buy a Ford and then complain that the engine is proprietary and that you should be able to put a Honda engine in it because of increased fuel efficiency. For crying out loud, now that there's a Linux powered handheld, BUY THAT if you really must have Linux on your handheld.

/soapbox

Re:proprietary hardware

Even if the hardware is better, proprietary hardware is bad. It limits the choices of what you can do with the devicce you own.

Proprietary != Incompatible.

The new Sony CPU mentioned in the article is a fairly normal ARM core with Sony's choice of peripherals built on-chip. This is a perfectly normal thing to do in the industry.

Damn it

I was hoping we'd see the first dual-Xeon handhelds, or even a 2GHz quad-G5 palm computer. I mean, think of the advances these would force in battery and heat dissipation technologies alone!

Re:Damn it

Either that or you'd see oven mitts at CompUSA marketed as "PDA accessories".

Re:Damn it

Either that or you'd see oven mitts at CompUSA marketed as "PDA accessories".

You could flip the keyboard over and it doubles as a skillet! Perfect for camping trips!

$700 price point

I still don't understand this. At this price, you are in direct competition with a laptop, and the laptop can do a lot more. I think that HP is moving in the right direction by offering sub $300 ipaq units that are actually quite nice.

Re:$700 price point

This argument again?! PDA / Laptop's have totally different use patterns. I don't/can't carry a laptop in my pocket. Windows doesn't boot in less than a second (even with suspend/hibernate). A laptops hard drive probably wouldn't take the knocking about my PDA gets... etc, etc. Chalk/cheese. Thank you!

just an ARM core in their ASIC

With the meager about of cache (32Kw split) that Intel ships with their Xscales, I don't blame Sony for taping out their own chip.

I've been trying to get Intel to increase their cache in response to the pressures from the kind of algorithms people want to run on portables, but even though they'll sacrafice battery life on the altar of huge, bright, color LCDs in their reference designs, they won't even double their cache.

Re:just an ARM core in their ASIC

The Sony Handheld Engine [impress.co.jp] has an ARM 926 core. It has to be ARM, because Palm OS 5 doesn't run on anything else.

Battery Life Impressive? Huh?

This new processor will give users 16 hours of battery life (impressive!)

Huh? Maybe 16 hours is impressive for a laptop computer or a Windows mobile device but this is a Palm OS device. My current color Clie gets at least that with backlight on most of the time.

And among other things

And among other this this processor will probably embbed some Sony(TM) internal DRM technology preventing you from putting the device to any good and proper use (OGG baby!). Other that that I would think that some of the more established CPU manufactureres (i.e. Motorola or Transmeta) would probably come with equaly impressive CPU solution of their own if it would be as simple as that. This is not to say that Sony doesn't have the know-how needed to produce one, but it also means that any serious attempt at this market will probably be the result of years of development and refinement. Unless they are developing the CPU on the basis of some already established architecture (ARM?) they are in for tough time if they are to produce The CPU to power their next-gen toys.

My $0.02

My Latitude LS gets 2 hours max

And that's the way I like it!

Price point

700$ seem expensive, but if you get the top-o-the-line zaurus and throw in a WLAN card, you get about the same price. However, this thing has a bigger screen, and it sounds like the sony may have much better battery life.

Marketing claims, however, aren't... we'll see when it gets independently reviewed.

Proprietary processor though... Hmmm... that might be a red flag.

Re:Price point

Proprietary processor though... Hmmm... that might be a red flag.

Well, the weird part isn't the ARM core, it's the undocumented and proprietary audio I/O, DSP, memory architecture and other devices that Sony puts into these devices. You can't even access those through the proprietary OS that runs on these machines.

However, this thing has a bigger screen, and it sounds like the sony may have much better battery life.

The Sharp actually seems like a nicer handheld and the Sharp screen has double the number of pixels. However, the better battery life and built-in BT and WiFi make the Sony a winner.

Also, the PDA software on the Sharp just isn't competitive: the Palm PDA apps are far better than the Sharp, and Bluetooth configuration on the Sharp is a nightmare. Furthermore, in a twist of irony, you can develop commercial apps for the Sony for free, using all free tools, while you need to pay a lot of money to develop commercial Qt/Embedded apps.

Sigh

> which are due to ship this Semptember

Damn, I was hoping for an Awegust release.

Where have I heard this before?

"This new processor will give users 16 hours of battery life..."

Hmm... where have I heard this before? Oh yeah... Transmeta. [vnunet.com]

It will be great if the handheld lives up to its hype... but I'll be waiting for benchmarks of a released product before I believe it.

ISA diversity is a benifit to linux

It would be nice if sony had another instruction set on these chips. Linux can adapt very quickly to new architecuyres unlike some commercial software. Gcc is especially easy to adapt to new architecture and with tools like KMD [freshmeat.net] you can have a whole compiler assembler debugger withing days reather than starting from scratch.

Its nice that companies now have a choice to make their own chips because the software is portable across architectures.

Re:ISA diversity is a benifit to linux

I can feel a new wave if ISAs coming through.

I hope so, but I haven't heard of anything free in practice lately [leapfrog.com] other than MIPS minus unaligned load/store patented instructions. Intel has ratcheted down the license fee for ARM ISA to literally next to nothing because they are competing against those free MIPS subsets [opencores.org].

The ISA is insignificant in comparison to cache architecture in all the heavy-duty applications I care about. [sensoryinc.com] A/V codecs, which lend themselves directly to hardware a lot better than huristic search does, as far as I'm concerned, are only good for the, erm, health benefits [thestar.com].

Can't wait for Red Star, though, I want solar powered speech toys.

nice hardware, weird software

The Clies are nifty hardware, but their software is getting weirder and weirder. Nominally, they run PalmOS, but the user interface is quite different and the Clies ship with a lot of applications that won't run on any other Palm.

Furthermore, some important Palm functions, like anything using audio, won't work on the Clies because Sony has created their own undocumented and proprietary APIs. Memory on these devices is also getting really strange, with 16M of RAM, 16M of more RAM that is somehow not quite as accessible, and 29M of built-in flash memory, plus some other RAM somewhere else for some other purpose.

Furthermore, Palm applications in general often don't scale well to high resolution or non-square screens, meaning that primarily applications designed for 320x480 landscape mode on these Clies will work well on them, while regular Palm applications will often just be scaled-up 160x160 windows.

I guess the best way to look at Clies is as consumer gadgets, not hardware running an operating system: you get the software that comes with them. Some additional Palm software may work on them, but perhaps not all that well.

I wish Sony would just put Palm out of their misery and buy them. They could then do something sensible like put PalmOS on top of a decent kernel, like Linux, QNX, or Symbian, while keeping the existing applications; those kernels could do as good a job at running existing Palm applications as PalmOS 5 does, and they don't suffer from the same memory management or driver stupidity as PalmOS. They would also make PalmOS a much more credible platform for enterprise apps. And, unlike PalmOS 6, they are here right now, they are debugged, they are mature, and they are efficient.

Magnesium...Titanium...

None of them satisfy me. It's depleted uranium or nothing! I want to drop my pda on the pavement and damage the pavement and not the pda.

Re:Magnesium...Titanium...

Why depleted?
Theres extra security if you can say "STOP THAT MAN WITH THE HAIR FALLING OUT!"

Also wouldn't need a powered backlight. :-)

Sony, good design and hidden flaws ?

I remember when I was in university, my roommate got a Sony VAIO. I think that telling its story could provide some information about how proprietary hardware could cause you headaches, especially with manufacturers such as Sony:

At first we were amazed at its design and size. But in the following months, he had to buy stuff and accessories from Sony (Sony's stuff is not often compatible with other manufacturers hardware) which were about twice more expensive than their counterparts from other manufacturers. That is even more true with PDAs upgrades which are extremely expensive compared to the original price of the device.

When he wanted to install a BSD, there was no support for his laptop for some months because Sony did not release at this time specs of the hardware used. Not to mention the integrated Wincam which was unusable outside of Windows

When XP was available, he discovered that he could not install it because of the proprietary hardware and there was no drivers available for windows XP on the Sony website. Furthermore Sony does not deliver Windows install CDs, but restore disks. When he contacted Sony, the last tech he talked to said they (Sony) don't support XP Pro since it wasn't the original software installed. Sorry, but his little sticker said "designed for Windows XP".

Not to mention some poor design about heat/small size, after a hour or more of an operation which uses alot of CPU (compiling, playing some video, picture editing), the back part of the laptop was so hot that he burned himself one time in closing it.

You just have to search some reviews from users on google Google [google.fr], to see that many users had complaints about their proprietary hardware. So knowing that Sony will use a proprietary processor in their PDA kinda scares me and I hope that future users of this device will not encounter as much problems as he did.

Vague?

" the ability to play video at a smooth 30fps"

That is pretty vague. I assume he means 480x320 mpeg-2?

will we be able to hack it...

and install windows?

Sony: "The computer industry lacks standards..."

I love it! I love it! Sony says here [sonystyle.com] (if that bizarrely long URL doesn't work, just go to SonyStyle, search on UX40, and click the Specifications tab):

"Computer Interface: The computer industry lacks standards, and therefore, there are a multitude of varying software packages and add-on hardware options. This device is not manufactured to any specific software, and Sony does not and cannot make any warranty or representation with respect to the performance of this product with any particular software packages and/or non-Sony add-on hardware option except those mentioned in this document. Sony hereby disclaims any representations or warranty that this product is compatible with any combination of products you may choose to connect. While Sony representatives or Sony authorized dealers may be able to assist you and may make recommendations, they are NOT authorized to vary or waive this disclaimer. Purchasers must determine for themselves the suitability and compatibility of the hardware and software in each and every particular instance."

Now, I ask you, ain't that the truth?

Sirius Cybernetics Corp anyone?

"We have the capability of injecting wonder, joy and levels of customization into a portable device so it becomes more like a companion or a friend to a lifestyle that uses digital technology."

-- Masanobu Yoshida, president of Sony Corporation's Handheld Computing Company

SONY's Severe NIH Syndrome

I'm not surprized at all that they are going with their own processor. SONY has the WORST case of NIH (not-invented-here) syndrome of any company that I've seen. When I worked there some (~10) years back I had to design, build, and write the software for a high end broadcast video card (made from about 64 Megs of STATIC RAM YOWZA!) because they felt that they had to have their own and didn't want to buy one! A huge waste of time but fun for me.

Sorry Sony

both the CLIE UX50 and UX40 handhelds will be available through American retailers in September for about $700 and $600

I'm awfully sorry Sony, even though the Clie is cool as hell, $600!!!!

Dell sells complete desktop systems for around $400 - $500. With monitor.

Substitute portability for sensibility.

Playstation Portable

Noting in your newspost that Sony will be adopting this technology into the "next generation of PlayStations", I'm going to guess that this means the up and coming PSP. If that is the case and these handhelds are getting 16 hours of battery life with a solid 30fps, I think (for the first time) Nintendo has something to worry about. Of course, games will make the processor a bit more busy than keeping your address book updated. Also, the motor for the game disc itself. It will be an interesting battle regardless. There is only one thing that looks pretty clear to me, the N-gauge is going to be left in the dust.

Memory Stink

Sony is doing a lot of great stuff, especially in the handheld area. If only they wouldn't be pushing Memory Stick. Why, why, do corporations have to make things incompatible with what's already there??? /me cries and runs to mommy

after support?

well I'd like to get one (due to battery life) but how have Sony reassured me that it will still be useful after they have stopped supporting it?

Following in Bill Gates' Footsteps

Do I smell another 'Microsoft' coming along? Might as well try to corner the market on handhelds and gaming consoles while you still can.

Dump Palm "OS" next!

Now they just need to get a real operating system for their handhelds -- something other than blechy Palm.

Re:Sony

Slashdot is not a united front. It's a website. You don't see references to "self-respecting Chicage Sun-Times readers" in the editorials of a newspaper do you?

Re:Self-made handheld processor name

Close, try Betaium. Dyslexia is a bitch.

Re:Tensilica?

The Sony Handheld Engine has an ARM and a Teak DSP (whatever that is); I don't see any Tensilica cores.