Month: November 2022

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, the company's flagship chip that will be coming to many Android phones over the next few months. Besides the usual newer, better, hopefully faster cores, a big piece of news is the addition of Wi-Fi 7 support so you can get better home wireless—provided you invest in a new router.

Qualcomm has some claims for this new chip. The company says the CPU "improves performance up to 35 percent" and has "up to 40 percent more power efficiency." The GPU supposedly "delivers up to 25 percent faster performance, with up to 45 percent better power efficiency." Take both of these claims with a grain of salt, since Qualcomm last year promised a 20 percent CPU improvement that never manifested in shipping products. Even if Qualcomm hits these performance promises, it would still be about a year behind the iPhone. The company is trying to do something about its uncompetitive performance with the (now legally encumbered) Nuvia acquisition, but those chips aren't ready yet.

Let's start with the basics. This is a 4 nm chip with an unusual layout containing four different CPU cores, all designed by Arm. The prime core is a 3.2 GHz Arm Cortex X3—that's all good and expected, and from here, Arm's recommended layout is three Cortex A710 CPUs for "medium" duty and four A510 CPUs for low-power background processing. Qualcomm isn't following the recommended layout, though, and after the Cortex X3 it has two different cores doing "medium" duty: a pair of Cortex-A715 CPUs and a pair of last-generation Cortex-A710 CPUs. After that, there are only three—not the expected four—Cortex A510 CPUs doing background duty.

Enlarge / This custom-built Game Boy Pocket SP can fold in half like a feisty clam. (credit: Allison Parrish)

Earlier this month, a programmer and hobbyist named Allison Parrish debuted a compact hack of the 1996 Nintendo Game Boy Pocket handheld game console. Taking inspiration from the later Game Boy Advance SP, she fabricated a custom plastic shell with a hinge so the older monochrome Game Boy can fold shut. She calls it the Game Boy Pocket SP.

In Parrish's extensive write-up of the mod, she explains that her hack began as something of a joke. The Game Boy modding community is popular right now, and one currently trending mod involves transplanting the circuitry of a folding Game Boy Advance SP (from 2003) into a non-folding custom shell. So she thought, "If y'all can take the hinge out of an SP, why can't I add a hinge to a Game Boy that never had one?"

Parrish, who is an assistant arts professor at NYU, built her complex folding mod over the summer using tools at her university department's ITP/IMA shop and the NYU Makerspace. Its unique clamshell design comes courtesy of a Game Boy Pocket motherboard she cut in half, along with custom-design flex PCBs (printed circuit boards) that route signals between the two folding halves. To pull it all together, Parrish designed a 3D-printed plastic shell using FreeCAD.