Jolla Mind2 progress

Devices
17
  • No, only Qualcomms’s current high-end Snapdragon SoCs (8 series) outperform an RK3588, their current midrange SoCs (6 and 7 series) offer roughly the same performance (depending on the application, e.g. if its memory intensive), their low-end SoCs (4 series) are a lot slower; for details, see below.
  • No, Jolla’s Mind2 is supposed to do all ML processing locally (i.e. on this device), that exactly is Jolla’s promise. Microsoft’s “Copilot+” basically does the same, but might reach out to various cloud services of Microsoft.

This is clearly not true:

  • The SoC of the RasberryPI 5 (released in 2023), the BCM2712 comes close but is not on par with the RK3588:

    • No TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), nowadays often called “NPU” (Neural Processing Unit).
    • No little CPU cluster, comprising quad-core Cortex-A55 on the RK3588.
    • The BCM2712 is built using a cheap, old 16 nm process, while the RK3588 is built on TMSC’s 8 nm LPP (Low Power Performance) process, which allows for using less power and / or clocking it higher.
    • The BCM2712 has a 32-bit LPDDR4/4x DRAM interface (two 16-bit channels), while the RK3588 has a 64-bit LPDDR4/4x/5 DRAM interface (four 16-bit channels) hence at least twice the memory bandwidth.
    • The BCM2712 is minimalistic with regard to built-in peripherals (as all Broadcom SoC) due to being designed for a single application (being used in RasberryPis) while most Rockchip SoCs including the RK3588 offer an extremely rich set of peripherals due to aiming at a broad spectrum of embedded applications (even surpassing Qualcomm’s Snapdragons, which are aimed at mobile phones, tablets and light laptops).
    • Broadcom is well known for designing their chips and accompanying software with minimal efforts, which results in faulty, insecure and sometimes outright broken functions. They also very rarely fix flaws by releasing new revisions of their chips.
    • Broadcom’s “Videocore” GPUs are pieces of shit: very slow, hard to program (i.e. to write and maintain drivers for)
    • The RasberryPi5 is only available with 4 GByte or 8 GByte RAM, in contrast to Mind2’s 16 GByte.
    • A RasberryPi5 with 8 GByte RAM costs about $ 80,- (not $ 15,-).

    See also this Wikipedia entry and the full RK3588 datasheet.

    The A76 “big” CPU cores were released by ARM in 2018, designing the RK3588 started in 2020 and it is in production since 2022, hence it is a quite modern SoC.

  • An Intel N100 (comprising four “Gracemont” CPU cores) processor is well comparable to the RK3588:
    Both have 64-bit memory interfaces (N100: one 64-bit channel DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR5), the GPUs are roughly comparable, the N100 offers slightly more CPU performance, but lacks a TPU (“NPU”), the N100 is built using Intel’s “Intel 7” process (previously referred to as Intel 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin “10ESF”) and was released in early 2023.

  • A Snapdragon 855 (Qualcomm’s high-end smartphone SoC released 2019) is very well comparable to the RK3588. Qualcomm implements their TPU functionality on their Hexagon DSPs, hence they very early offered explicit tensor processing (with the Hexagon 685 in 2018 which provided a mere 3 TOPS).
    Qualcomm’s upper midrange SoCs (Snapdragon 7 series) all have only a 32-bit memory interface (two 16-bit channels), so do their lower midrange SoCs (Snapdragon 6 series) since 2018. The low-end Snapdragon 4 series SoCs only have a single 16-bit channel memory interface, as did Snapdragon 6xx SoCs before 2018. BTW, the latest Snapdragon 4 SoCs lack a Hexagon DSP at all (i.e. they do all audio- and video-de/encoding etc. on the CPU).
    Thus “No”, no “average midrange 7 year old snapdragon SoC even outperforms this rk3588”, 7 years ago all of Qualcomm’s midrange SoCs did not even offer TPU functions, and in terms of CPU, GPU and memory performance the RK3588 also clearly beats any “midrange 7 year old snapdragon SoC”.

Their refusal to make it an app is a joke.

Well, exactly that is their business model. :face_with_diagonal_mouth: Telling people that the data on a box connected via network (Ethernet, WiFi etc.) is much more safe than on a smartphone.

But it is definitely not a scam.

The RK3588’s 6 TOPS for Int8 tensors is in the same ballpark as the first PC / Laptop processors with built-in TPUs: AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 8000 desktop and laptop processors (released in 2023) with TPUs (“Ryzen AI”) offer between 10 and 16 TOPS, while the TPUs in Intel’s brand new (2024) Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs top out at 10 TOPS.[1]
This is much faster than running ML models in software on a CPU and faster than running them on an integrated GPU.

But for having a device certified for Microsoft’s “Copilot+” (which addresses exactly the same use cases on a PC / laptop as Jolla’s Mind2 does in an external box), it has to offer 40 TOPS locally, which only brand new CPUs are capable of: Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon X Elite / X Plus” (40 - 45 TOPS, mid 2024), AMD’s “Ryzen AI 300 series” (50 - 55 TOPS, July 2024), Intel offers nothing comparable.

My summary is: The Mind2 is the best Jolla could possibly achieve when they started designing the hardware (Qualcomm hardware is not a good choice when one cannot order in batches of at least 10.000 SoCs), ultimately the software is decisive for what functionality Jolla’s Mind2 offers to end users; if the SoC is performant enough for that largely depends on the software and what exactly it is used for (i.e. which tasks, kind of data and amount of data).

Yes, but it offers no display connectivity and you pay a lot for Jolla’s software stack. You might better buy a cheap desktop PC (“Chinese box”), or an RK3588 board and an enclosure for the money, and install a Linux distribution of your choice on it.

Can I use it in other linguages (ex. Portuguese?)

I would expect Jolla’s ML software to support entering prompts and classifying texts in various languages, but properly training it for a large variety of languages is time-consuming, so do not expect that to work well right from the start.
If Jolla is smart, they provide the infrastructure for “the community” to perform this task, as they (uniquely) did for translating strings for SailfishOS. Well, as this is initially more work to employ this infrastructure in a way which is usable for everyone and Jolla’s smart moves are rare, I do not expect much, but would be glad to be positively surprised.

P.S.:

Again (now someone else), please do refrain from posting spam-links (this addresses the link itself, not the link target!).

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