Four Cores in a Cellphone ?

[newbie2]

Smartphones with dual-core processors are still a bonus—but what about four of those goddamn things? The alleged Android-y HTC Edge packs that, plus a sizzling Tegra 3 package. That's one spicy processing meatball, if PocketNow is correct.
http://gizmodo.com/5857144/holy-crap-four-cores-in-a-cellphone
Something for Ubuntu ? :
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/can-ubuntu-linux-win-on-smartphones-and-tablets/9843
:popcorn:

[Dr. C]

So one can run Ubuntu on it. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1872724

[drawkcab]

http://www.pcsarizona.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/50-year-old-computer.jpg

See that thing with the steering wheel? That's my new cell phone.

[3rdalbum]

That's just ridiculous. Who is going to have three intensive threads running at the same time on a smartphone? Maybe five years in the future. Not today.

[vehemoth]

It would be probably be three or so threads from the same application.
I've always wanted to run CAD on my phone

[Grenage]

That's just ridiculous. Who is going to have three intensive threads running at the same time on a smartphone? Maybe five years in the future. Not today.

A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with you!

[forrestcupp]

I'm using my phone right now to program the upcoming Crysis 3 and design all of the content for it, while at the same time, recording a 10 song, 32-track studio album through a professional grade USB sound card hooked to my phone's badA full size USB host slot, and also simultaneously creating the music video for the title track of that album.

Hope I don't actually get a phone call while I'm recording.

[BrokenKingpin]

4 cores is probably overkill for the average smartphone, and would probably be crap on battery life. The single core processor in my Android phone is fast enough, what I do want is a batter that doesn't need to be charged every 5 minutes.

[andras artois]

EVERY SINGLE TIME new technology is released people are always saying 'oh we don't need it blah blah blah' or 'maybe in 5 years'. SHUT UP. Do you not want technology to progress? Do you not understand the idea of progression? Anyone who ever says this is thick. Like denser than a brick thick.

Also quad core in phones works a little different than most. There are 4 equal cores and a companion core. You have the companion core which takes on all the mundane tasks when your phones idling. Things like music playing, keeping an eye on the battery, all the boring background stuff. It uses less power than the others and isn't powerful (like 700mhz).

When you start doing exciting stuff like interneting, watching videos, playing games, you'll start using the extra cores as necessary. When you phones just sitting around, chilling hanging with cloud or whatever then it's not going to be running at full throttle, all five cores blazing past as they can.

It's not like nvidia have just dropped an i7 straight into a phone. Battery technology hasn't progressed as fast as microprocessor technology however microprocessor technology has got a lot more efficient.

If you don't want a really high end phone then don't buy it and for gods sake don't bitch about new ones coming out.

[KiraLexi]

EVERY SINGLE TIME new technology is released people are always saying 'oh we don't need it blah blah blah' or 'maybe in 5 years'. SHUT UP. Do you not want technology to progress? Do you not understand the idea of progression? Anyone who ever says this is thick. Like denser than a brick thick.

Also quad core in phones works a little different than most. There are 4 equal cores and a companion core. You have the companion core which takes on all the mundane tasks when your phones idling. Things like music playing, keeping an eye on the battery, all the boring background stuff. It uses less power than the others and isn't powerful (like 700mhz).

When you start doing exciting stuff like interneting, watching videos, playing games, you'll start using the extra cores as necessary. When you phones just sitting around, chilling hanging with cloud or whatever then it's not going to be running at full throttle, all five cores blazing past as they can.

It's not like nvidia have just dropped an i7 straight into a phone. Battery technology hasn't progressed as fast as microprocessor technology however microprocessor technology has got a lot more efficient.

If you don't want a really high end phone then don't buy it and for gods sake don't bitch about new ones coming out.

This argument again...

What cell phone workload, ever, can you think of that provides three compute-intensive threads? I'm skeptical that any real one - not something vague like "gaming" - does or will any time soon. There are diminishing returns with increasing core count (see Amdahl's Law) because in real life, consumer workloads just don't parallelize all that well. Higher clock speed usually gives better results than multi-core, and will generate a speed-up in every scenario that multi-core does, as well as also improving single-thread performance.

"Throw more cores at a problem," just like "throw wider instruction issue and more execution units at a problem" and "throw a longer pipeline and higher clocks at a problem," is not an automatic guarantee of success unless you're using a specific workload that scales well to multiple cores. Just ask Sun and AMD...

[forrestcupp]

EVERY SINGLE TIME new technology is released people are always saying 'oh we don't need it blah blah blah' or 'maybe in 5 years'. SHUT UP. Do you not want technology to progress? Do you not understand the idea of progression? Anyone who ever says this is thick. Like denser than a brick thick.
It's a freakin' phone, for crying out loud. Phones are for making phone calls to people. :)

Yes, I do have an Android-based smart phone. Honestly, phones are too small a form factor to be useful for much that would require such processing power, at least in their present form. Even things like Siri doesn't require a quad-core. Maybe when they change form to be linked to your optical and cochlear nerves and they are completely driven by speech and brain waves, then they will need more processing power. But in their current form, they're pretty much practically useless for any application that needs that kind of horsepower.

My single core Droid X can easily handle any app I've thrown at it. My tablet is larger, and has more possibilities than my phone, so I'm more open to its need for the dual core processor that it has.

[andras artois]

Perhaps the increased processing power will open up opportunities we haven't realised yet and won't realise until we already have the processing power to do it.

3D models of CAD work, complex mathematical problems, computer in a pocket.

At the end of the day new models cost pretty much the same as the previous generation and at the very worst its technological advancement for the sake of it which, lets face it, isn't a bad thing.

Yeah it won't make a difference to most people but at worst you'll get thinner phones that last longer on a single charge. I just think it's dumb to complain about more impressive tech being rolled out.

[3Miro]

Perhaps the increased processing power will open up opportunities we haven't realised yet and won't realise until we already have the processing power to do it.

3D models of CAD work, complex mathematical problems, computer in a pocket.

At the end of the day new models cost pretty much the same as the previous generation and at the very worst its technological advancement for the sake of it which, lets face it, isn't a bad thing.

Yeah it won't make a difference to most people but at worst you'll get thinner phones that last longer on a single charge. I just think it's dumb to complain about more impressive tech being rolled out.

Do you really think anyone would do CAD on a phone? If they tape it to their eyeball maybe. I am in the field of Computational Science, let me put it this way: nobody would ever do complex math or CAD or anything else of that nature on a phone. For simple test runs, you go to a laptop and if you want to do a real problem, you go to the cluster.

[andras artois]

Do you really think anyone would do CAD on a phone? If they tape it to their eyeball maybe. I am in the field of Computational Science, let me put it this way: nobody would ever do complex math or CAD or anything else of that nature on a phone. For simple test runs, you go to a laptop and if you want to do a real problem, you go to the cluster.

Not necessarily making but displaying a true 3d model but maybe a 3d map, in really big detail.

[wolfen69]

This thread amuses me. :)

[Shining Arcanine]

That's just ridiculous. Who is going to have three intensive threads running at the same time on a smartphone? Maybe five years in the future. Not today.

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=race+to+idle

[johnnybgoode83]

Seriously though what would people be doing with their phones that they would need that kind of processing power? It seems like overkill to me.

[KiraLexi]

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=race+to+idle

That's only relevant if you have a workload that will be meaningfully accelerated by multithreading. That isn't most of them.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I remember buying a computer many years ago with a 2 GB hard drive. I was thinking that I would never fill it up.

:lolflag:

along with wolfen69

It's a shame how history repeats itself.

[IWantFroyo]

What?! Why would you even need four cores?!?!

I seriously cannot think of anyone who would even end up needing four cores on even their computer.

I'm going to go bang my head against a wall at how heavy "mobile" OSes must be getting.

Edit- Also, there go my dreams of having ICS running smoothly on my 800MHz Aria. :(

[lisati]

The problem as I see it is that one day, people will want to actually do something useful with their phone, like phone calls. :D

On a more serious note, people's needs change. I remember being impressed when I got one of my computers and it had a 133MHz clock speed. That's right, MHz. At the time, I didn't see the need for anything much faster. These days, now that I'm into digital video editing, I probably wouldn't want to go below a dual-core machine with a clock speed of 1.6GHz.

[pommie]

Could it be simple economics, if the company also produces tablets or other units requiring 4 cores, then it quite possible that doubling the 4 core order is cheaper (per chip) than two separate orders of 4 core and 2 core.

Cheers David

[Quadunit404]

I seriously cannot think of anyone who would even end up needing four cores on even their computer.

Four cores would be nice if you're rendering a video, playing a video game or if you're running other resource-intensive processes. That, however, is for a different thread.

On-topic, I cannot think of a time when you would need a quad-core processor <insert bad joke about my username here> in a cellphone. Single- or dual-core processors have been all what people need thus far. Ringing a familiar bell in this thread, perhaps in the future having a quad-core processor for a cellphone would be useful, but right now the only use for a processor with three or more cores I see is on a PC.

[3Miro]

I remember buying a computer many years ago with a 2 GB hard drive. I was thinking that I would never fill it up.

:lolflag:

along with wolfen69

It's a shame how history repeats itself.

When you had 2GB HDD, this was the highest anyone can get. Right now I can get 12 core desktop if I want to. I wonder if all 4 phone cores combined can compare to even one core on my i7. 4 cores on a phone is way too weak to compare with a real computer and way too much for what you would want to do on a phone. This is just a marketing trick, nothing more.

[Grenage]

EVERY SINGLE TIME new technology is released people are always saying 'oh we don't need it blah blah blah' or 'maybe in 5 years'. SHUT UP. Do you not want technology to progress? Do you not understand the idea of progression? Anyone who ever says this is thick. Like denser than a brick thick.

Also quad core in phones works a little different than most. There are 4 equal cores and a companion core. You have the companion core which takes on all the mundane tasks when your phones idling. Things like music playing, keeping an eye on the battery, all the boring background stuff. It uses less power than the others and isn't powerful (like 700mhz).

When you start doing exciting stuff like interneting, watching videos, playing games, you'll start using the extra cores as necessary. When you phones just sitting around, chilling hanging with cloud or whatever then it's not going to be running at full throttle, all five cores blazing past as they can.

It's not like nvidia have just dropped an i7 straight into a phone. Battery technology hasn't progressed as fast as microprocessor technology however microprocessor technology has got a lot more efficient.

If you don't want a really high end phone then don't buy it and for gods sake don't bitch about new ones coming out.

I'd have to say that I completely agree. Phones aren't just phones these days; if you wanted just a phone (good luck there), you simply wouldn't buy something so advanced.

I personally want to organise my life, play games, watch movies when waiting, et cetera. Let's not forget that there are now phones which you can plug into a monitor/kb/mouse, to create a fully functional computer.

CAD on the phone is suddenly... not to absurd.

[Lucradia]

Tegra 3 just released, and it's 61 percent more power efficient than Tegra 2, and has two more cores (making it quad core), and more power.

(Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-57320891-251/nvidias-tegra-3-cpu-increases-performance-while-saving-power/)

get ready to cry over your galaxy Nexus when you receive it, as it still only has a dual-core 1.2 GHz.

[sffvba[e0rt]

"...you say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos&ob=av3e


404

[Lucradia]

Be glad they're ARMs, not Intels ;D

Also, a merge is imminent with this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1877185

Which I did not know was there even two-three pages into the community cafe.

[Evil-Ernie]

I still have a 'dumb' phone as I use it as a phone, to make calls etc. I still havent bought a smartphone because I feed I dont need it, they are still too much of a halfwayhouse between a phone and mobile PC with a PDA crunched on the side of them. If I need a PC on the move I have my laptop.

However we are now moving into a realm where the processing power on a mobile device is getting to the usable work machine, running applications that are near or the same as a desktop PC or laptop.

Next year will see a commercial laptop/pc processor in a phone sized device, I have made this claim in other threads as I know it will happen and it will be a game changer. In the near future instead of pulling a laptop out of a bag on a train we will be reaching into our pockets for our mobile computing, maybe peripherals like a seperate larger screen and keyboard etc but the point is the major computing will take place on the handheld device.

Exciting stuff!

[forrestcupp]

At the end of the day new models cost pretty much the same as the previous generation and at the very worst its technological advancement for the sake of it which, lets face it, isn't a bad thing.Hey, I'm all for new technology. I don't have a problem with them throwing quad-cores in a phone; I just know that with the current form factor of our phones, it's never truly going to be needed. They're going to have to change the form of the phone before that will be necessary. To spell that out more clearly, what I mean is that phones' screens are too small and their input methods are too lacking right now for there to be any practical application that truly needs a quad-core. Nobody that CAD or modeling is truly important to is going to use a phone for that, even if the phone can handle it.

I don't care if they put one in there, but they're going to have to change how the rest of the phone works for them to really be needed.


Yeah it won't make a difference to most people but at worst you'll get thinner phones that last longer on a single charge. I just think it's dumb to complain about more impressive tech being rolled out.Usually adding cores and horsepower means less battery life.

[Evil-Ernie]

Usually adding cores and horsepower means less battery life.

That is the problem and why it hasn't been done before, that and heat.
A lot of the development focus hasn't actually been getting the processor down to the size required but supplying it with enough power to make it feasable and making sure the hardware doesnt overheat in a confined enclosure whilst living in somebodies pocket.

[andras artois]

Usually adding cores and horsepower means less battery life.

Companion core. This wonderful little friend is a really low power core that gets used for all the background stuff. When it does slightly more intensive stuff it'll switch to a single regular core turning off the companion core. It'll only switch on the extras when needed. The cores don't even have to run at the 1.4GHZ. They can scale down to like 800MHZ if the processing requirements are low enough.

What bit of this is everyone not getting? If you don't use it for rendering 3D films then it won't use loads of power. If you just internet/facebook/call/text then you'll rarely use anything more than the companion core and 1 or 2 cores. The difference will be that it can spread the load across a couple of cores using less power than a single core running it's little legs off.

Is it easier for a sofa to be carried by one really big guy or two little guys?

[3Miro]

Companion core. This wonderful little friend is a really low power core that gets used for all the background stuff. When it does slightly more intensive stuff it'll switch to a single regular core turning off the companion core. It'll only switch on the extras when needed. The cores don't even have to run at the 1.4GHZ. They can scale down to like 800MHZ if the processing requirements are low enough.

What bit of this is everyone not getting? If you don't use it for rendering 3D films then it won't use loads of power. If you just internet/facebook/call/text then you'll rarely use anything more than the companion core and 1 or 2 cores. The difference will be that it can spread the load across a couple of cores using less power than a single core running it's little legs off.

Is it easier for a sofa to be carried by one really big guy or two little guys?

Except that one big guy working hard would eat less food than couple of weak guys not working hard. Two cores at half the speed would eat more power than one core at full speed.

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/applications-power-management/race-to-idle.php

[cariboo]

Merged two similar threads.

[forrestcupp]

What bit of this is everyone not getting? If you don't use it for rendering 3D films then it won't use loads of power. If you just internet/facebook/call/text then you'll rarely use anything more than the companion core and 1 or 2 cores.


And that statement right there does a great job of making my point. If you're not doing anything that needs a quad core, then you don't really need a quad core. :)

And in the current form factor of phone, no one is ever going to do anything that needs a quad core.

About the whole battery life thing. I had a cell phone even before flip phones came out. My first cell phone could do nothing but store people's phone numbers and make calls. That was back when the good phones could store 100 phone numbers instead of 20. I don't even think people were texting yet at that time. That phone would last almost a week without needing charged. Now with my ultra smart phone, I can barely get a day. That's really good advancement in battery life technology, there. ;)

[simpleblue]

Four cores might not be enough if someone was multi-tasking. Who uses a smartphone just for the phone anyways?

Someone might be doing all this at the same time:

- Downloading a torrent
- In the middle of a game
- Gets a skype call / regular phone call
- New email comes in
- Phone is updating itself
- Lots of widgets on panel
- ...

Anyways, I don't think four cores is enough. People are complaining that two cores on Android is too slow. Check the motorola forums for yourself.

[forrestcupp]

Four cores might not be enough if someone was multi-tasking. Who uses a smartphone just for the phone anyways?

Someone might be doing all this at the same time:

- Downloading a torrent
- In the middle of a game
- Gets a skype call / regular phone call
- New email comes in
- Phone is updating itself
- Lots of widgets on panel
- ...

Anyways, I don't think four cores is enough. People are complaining that two cores on Android is too slow. Check the motorola forums for yourself.Lol. I have a single core Droid X, and I've pretty much done all of that with no problem.

And it's a Motorola, too. ;)

[lisati]

And that statement right there does a great job of making my point. If you're not doing anything that needs a quad core, then you don't really need a quad core. :)

And in the current form factor of phone, no one is ever going to do anything that needs a quad core.

About the whole battery life thing. I had a cell phone even before flip phones came out. My first cell phone could do nothing but store people's phone numbers and make calls. That was back when the good phones could store 100 phone numbers instead of 20. I don't even think people were texting yet at that time. That phone would last almost a week without needing charged. Now with my ultra smart phone, I can barely get a day. That's really good advancement in battery life technology, there. ;)

Ah, memories. I remember using someone else's "brick" of the sort that were around in the early 1990s and that could cost $NZ1000 or more. By the time Mrs Lisati & I got our first mobiles both the size and price had reduced. Our current mobile phone needs are still fairly basic, and we still use our current phones mainly for **shock horror** making phone calls.

[wewantutopia]

Usually adding cores and horsepower means less battery life.

Did you read the article posted by Lucradia??? http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-57320891-251/nvidias-tegra-3-cpu-increases-performance-while-saving-power/

4 cores (really 5 cores) rather than the 2 in Tegra 2 and uses up to 61% less power.

Check this out too: http://phandroid.com/2011/11/09/quad-core-android-nvidia-tegra-3-explored-in-depth/

First video is some up coming mobile games.

The second demonstrates the companion core.

I for one welcome the advances.

[forrestcupp]

I for one welcome the advances.

I welcome advances, too. I was basically arguing because andras pretty much had the attitude that anyone who thinks 4 cores is overkill for a phone is stupid.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

When you had 2GB HDD, this was the highest anyone can get.

Actually, it wasn't.


Right now I can get 12 core desktop if I want to. I wonder if all 4 phone cores combined can compare to even one core on my i7. 4 cores on a phone is way too weak to compare with a real computer and way too much for what you would want to do on a phone. This is just a marketing trick, nothing more.
It could be nothing but marketing; however, I just read about these quad-core phones two days ago without any specs for battery life or processor performance. I'll wait for more information before making any judgement about their usefulness for my needs.

[joneberger]

"...you say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos&ob=av3e


404

Excellent Weird Al quote.

[Grenage]

Saying that 4 processors in a model of smart-phone is overkill due to your current usage, is a 'bit' like saying that:

Sports cars/bikes are overkill, because you never top 70mph.
A washing machine with a turbo spin cycle is pointless, because you wouldn't use it.
I don't like Mars bars (what point do they serve?), so nobody should.

God forbid, one could just.. not buy the phone.

[3rdalbum]

Someone might be doing all this at the same time:

- Downloading a torrent

I doubt it, we're talking about a PHONE here, not a computer with a cheap ADSL 2 plan. But even then, downloading uses almost no CPU time.

- In the middle of a game
- Gets a skype call / regular phone call

The game gets suspended and uses no CPU time when not actually running.

- New email comes in
- Phone is updating itself

Doesn't require much CPU time, except if there's decompression involved in the updates. The actual decompression and installation gets done in a special mode that stops all other processes, if I recall correctly. Talking about Android here.

- Lots of widgets on panel

Widgets use almost no CPU time either.


Anyways, I don't think four cores is enough. People are complaining that two cores on Android is too slow. Check the motorola forums for yourself.

That's because of Motoblur, a terrible battery-sucking vampire of a phone UI. Remove Motoblur, or just don't buy a Motorola phone, and even a single core will fly.

Quad-core phones could be useful if you are using video chat on Skype and also doing something else intensive in the background, such as applying a set of filters to your entire photo gallery. Do we do this with our phones today? No, not as far as I'm aware. I'm not against technology improvements but I honestly don't see a need for quad-core phones except in a few years time. I think they're going to make quad-core phones so they can play the "tech specs game", and then we'll be paying for performance we'll never use as manufacturers will stop making decent dual-core phones in favour of the quad core ones.

[3rdalbum]

Saying that 4 processors in a model of smart-phone is overkill due to your current usage, is a 'bit' like saying that:

Sports cars/bikes are overkill, because you never top 70mph.
A washing machine with a turbo spin cycle is pointless, because you wouldn't use it...

God forbid, one could just.. not buy the phone.

Sports cars and sports bikes are overkill, because you're not allowed to drive them to the extent of the extra performance that you're paying for.

A washing machine with a turbo spin cycle is pointless if nobody has a use for it.

But some day it will be impossible to buy a decent quality smartphone with two cores; they'll all be four cores, and you'll be paying for performance you'll never be able to use.

[Grenage]

Sports cars and sports bikes are overkill, because you're not allowed to drive them to the extent of the extra performance that you're paying for.

True, unless you take the vehicle on a track day, which most enthusiasts will.


A washing machine with a turbo spin cycle is pointless if nobody has a use for it.

True, but let's not confuse you/me with everybody/nobody.


But some day it will be impossible to buy a decent quality smartphone with two cores; they'll all be four cores, and you'll be paying for performance you'll never be able to use.

I imagine that when this time finally comes, the phone software will be of a level where it's a requirement. Phone manufacturer's aren't stupid, and they have a good idea of the market; I mean, you can still buy very good, very basic phones.

[forrestcupp]

Saying that 4 processors in a model of smart-phone is overkill due to your current usage, is a 'bit' like saying that:

Sports cars/bikes are overkill, because you never top 70mph.
A washing machine with a turbo spin cycle is pointless, because you wouldn't use it.
I don't like Mars bars (what point do they serve?), so nobody should.

God forbid, one could just.. not buy the phone.

There's nothing wrong with people buying things they don't really need just because they think it's cool. There's nothing wrong with that at all.

But let's call it what it is, and not try to justify it by claiming that we actually need it. If I want a quad-core phone because I think they're cool, I'll buy it. And I don't have to try to prove to anyone that I really need the horsepower.

[newbie2]

...you’ll be able to classify something as powerful as a Samsung Galaxy S II, the most advanced Android smartphone you can buy from a shop right now, as “entry level” in just over 2 years.
http://www.intomobile.com/2011/11/10/telefnicas-european-general-manager-states-obvious-nokias-windows-phones-cost-too-much/
:popcorn: