With just a few hours for the launch of the much awaited Moto X smartphone, the details of the X8 system which is supposed to power the device have already surfaced, giving an insight of the device functioning.
While the Moto X would be in general powered by a dual core Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, the device would also feature an independent Motorola X8, which is more than just a processor, and would contribute to feature like making the phone listen continuously. Moto X makes an advance from the usual CPU architectures to a new type of intelligent, probabilistic computing, which is achieved with the help of the additional cores.
The Moto X would feature two additional processing engines – a contextual computing processor and a natural language processor, however neither of these are ARM based cores. The contextual computing processor would control the sensors, display and touch interaction besides making the device battery efficient. The natural language processor would manage audio, noise estimation and noise cancellation.
Commenting about the system, Iqbal Arshad, Motorola senior VP of engineering said, “It’s done by Motorola, a lot of design in the entire system. The actual silicon is specified by us but we don’t go ahead and design and fab it. It’s not an ARM processor, it’s a very low-power separate processor. If we did not have the contextual computing processor and our natural language processor in place, we would need two additional batteries. The X8 consists of a 28 nm Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.7 GHz”
