raichama wrote...
My first reaction to the 10bit is kneejerk, but I'm going to look at the bigger picture. This actually bodes well for mobile devices in general. The iPhone 5 is capable of this because of the Cortex-A15s inside of it. So I am looking forward to other A15 options that will be coming out in the next few months such as the Exynos 5 Dual and the Tegra 4.
Also, a question. Do you believe most of the work is coming from the GPU or the CPU. For example, the Tegra 3 manages to play 10bit due to the sheer power of its 12-core GPU, while the GS3 manages to play 10bit due to the sheer power of its CPU. Which approach is the A6 taking on 10bit?
There are a few wrong things here, so pardon myself for correcting you.
For one, the A6 does not utilise the Cortex-A15 architecture. It doesn't use the Cortex-A9 either. It uses a completely Apple designed SoC. It has nothing to do with any other smartphone out there. With the A5 they used Cortex-A9, but with the A6 they used a completely new personal SoC they designed themselves from the ground up.
Secondly, it doesn't matter what kind of specs you have on an Android device. If you try playing 10-bit files on the Galaxy S III or the Nexus 7 (which uses Tegra 3), you will still occasionally see colour defects, framerate drops and incorrect typesetting. This is true, and if you try it you will find out regardless what player you use (I've found that MX Player yields the best results, but it's still far from perfect). iPhone 5 is the only phone that does it perfectly because it's the first iPhone that's powerful enough - and the software has been good for a long time already, but there wasn't a device powerful enough.
It's not really a hardware problem if you want to put it that way - it's the software optimisation. Right now, nothing on Android can do it. It doesn't matter if the SGS3 is powerful enough. It is - but it just can't do it. There is no app for it. And nothing can do H/W decoding on 10-bit files yet.