CPU Fenix 8 and enduro

FlowState said:

Don't see what Garmin has to gain either.

Pretty much nothing, just making the couple of geeks happy. I think there's reasons they don't do that.

Interesting that NXP one is released at 2021 and is based on 2016 released Cortex-M33. NXP doesn't have anything, but there would be for example Renesas RA8D1 that would probably be possible replacement if they would need MORE POWAH.

jmto said:

Pretty much nothing, just making the couple of geeks happy. I think there's reasons they don't do that.

Same.

I don't mind reading about Garmin tech specs, that's why I always look at the numbers for 3rd CIQ benchmarks when a new device comes out (even if the results are necessarily meaningful.)

Most of the sub-components are identical to F7/E2 and FRx55/x65. Waiting for Benchmark results (SDK 7.3.0 was released yesterday, need app update).

• GPS - ANT/BLE/BT and TSC are differents

Its not that I really care about the Fenix as a computer instead of an appliance.  So I don't directly care about what cput or memory it has.  More that there is functionality/metrics that could be done if the device had more compute power which limits what functionality can be added to the Fenix 8 over its life. Not to mention faster drawing maps so its easier to look around on the watch.

For example the mic functionality is nice.  Is the watch powerful enough to use speech input in places that use the keyboard input on the watch now? Sure that may not be there now in the watch cause they didn't do it yet, but could that be possible?

enki42ea said:

For example the mic functionality is nice.  Is the watch powerful enough to use speech input in places that use the keyboard input on the watch now?

It wouldn't surprise me if they're using NXP's voice command libraries for the voice command stuff given its supported by the i.MX RT series. Technically the Fenix 7, 265 etc is powerful enough to run it if they had a mic given they're using the RT500.

www.nxp.com/.../voice-intelligent-technology-wake-word-and-voice-command-engines:VOICE-INTELLIGENT-TECHNOLOGY

It looks it looks like you have to create your own model for the voice to command mapping, so it doesn't appear to support full voice to text conversion yet. That's likely going to require quite a complex model large enough to need it's own NPU baked into the SoC in order to work. Then again, I'm not a ML engineer, so this may run fine on an M33 core (but doubtful).

I'm guessing it's going to be a couple more years before we see it in an SOC efficient enough for something like a watch. That said, the RT500 is pretty long in the tooth at this point. I'm sure NXP have been busily working away on something more powerful (one of the reasons why I'm hanging back from buying the Fenix 8).

NXP do have their own NPU in silicon, but it's packaged into the more power hungry processors at this point.

www.nxp.com/.../eiq-neutron-npu:EIQ-NEUTRON-NPU

The current Android smart watches are based on the W5+ SoC from Qualcom which has a M55 low power co processor.  With the RT500 using a M33 cpu would seem like a transition to a M55 instead of the smaller M52 would give it the NPU 

enki42ea said:

With the RT500 using a M33 cpu would seem like a transition to a M55 instead of the smaller M52 would give it the NPU 

M55 would certainly be a great candidate if it's got similar power consumption properties of the M33.

Looks like the M52 might also have an NPU (what ARM calling a vector processing unit).

https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/cortex-m/cortex-m52

It's got me wondering why we haven't seen an M52 or M55 SoC out of NXP yet. Maybe the negotiations happened between the big non-Android Wear watch makers and the unit cost was too high at the time.

Interesting that Qualcomm seem to be able to deliver the W5+ at a very reasonable price (keeping watches around the $400 mark), and that's with an absolutely wild SoC with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, a stonking Adreno 702 GPU and an LTE modem, and all on 4nm! Absolutely wrecks the M33 in terms of raw processing power.

We're living in the dark ages over here with the RT500, but still making it work! Kudos to Garmin developers who are making magic happen on a single core that barely sips power.

8924630 said:

I appreciate that's not for everyone but as an ultra runner it works

ClimbPro is basically your contours in that case right

Exactly!!