If there was on thing we were surprised about with today’s Motorola DROID announcement, it was that the phones are powered by Motorola’s own ARM-based processor. It’s called the X8 Mobile Computing System. What exactly is it? The “8″ is for the amount of cores, but it’s not an octa-core. It’s just the total amount of cores dedicated for certain functions. It includes a 1.7GHz dual-core processor for your apps, a 400MHz quad-core graphics processor, a single-core contextual processor, and a single-core natural language processor.
The new DROIDs are always “listening” to your commands or feeding you information via the Active Display notifications. One would expect that an “always on” feature like this would take its toll on the battery, but the contextual processor and the natural language processor prevent that from happening.
It appears the guts of the X8 is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC family. I suspect it’s the Snapdragon S4 Pro with an Adreno 320 GPU. I also suspect that this is the same configuration that will be in the Moto X. If you remember, the leaked CPU showed as a Qualcomm S4 Pro MSM8960DT clocked at 1.7GHz and the GPU was an Adreno 320. The big question was the letter “T” in the model number of the Snapdragon. It must designate Motorola’s modifications of adding in the final two cores for the “always on” features.
So yes, it is a marketing gimmick, but I don’t think Motorola is really trying to fool people in thinking that it is an octa-core. The Motorola rep I spoke made it very clear that it’s not an octa-core. If it give us 48 hours of battery life, I’m not going to complain.
Come comment on this article: New DROIDs feature Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System, What is it?
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