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Dual-Core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011
An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer."
I made a comment about dual/quad core phones a while back and was laughed at. It will happen folks and sooner than you suspect. Phones are quickly becoming our primary computing device, or at least the centerpiece of our electronic lives.
It's not about playing Doom on a smart phone, it's about the phone being able to do everything we ask it to do without having to wait too long.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4
Uh...no? Maybe you're confusing its SOC nature by combining a GPU and CPU, but it is most definitely not a dual-core CPU.
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"Runs smoothly" would be a selling point. "Amazing graphics" would be a selling point. "Long battery life" would be a selling point. But the number of bits of silicon inside the phone really isn't going to attract many consumers.
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For the same reason that 2GHz is better than 1.4GHz. The number is bigger, so the PHBs and yuppies will clamour for them. Meanwhile, those of us with an eye for detail will look at things like battery capacity, sound quality, compatibility with existing architectures and applications, and make informed decisions, instead of pawing at the latest shiny-shiny like a kitten with a toy.
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Unlikely, really.
First, a good reason to NOT be dual core is battery life - slower is better. iPhone hardware has always lagged the Android models - the original iPhone and iPhone 3G had 412MHz CPUs, while the G1 (same year) had a 524MHz CPU - nearly 25% faster. The iPhone 3GS sported a 624MHz CPU or so (50% faster than iPhone/iPhone 3G), at a time when the Android hotness was 1GHz CPUs (50% faster than iPhone 3GS). The iPhone 4 is supposed to have around an 800MHz CPU, and current gen Androids have 1.2GHz CPUs.
The only thing to come close would be the iPad with its 1GHz processor.
The iPad's also the most likely one to sport a dual core processor - it has the massive battery packs (it's what, 90% battery?) to have decent battery life with dual cores.
If Androids of 2011 get dual core, it'll probably be 2012 at the earliest before Apple releases a dual core A5 chip or something for the iPhone, with the A5 debuting on the second gen iPad first at the absolute earliest. Or maybe it'll be 3rd gen iPad at that point.
Remember, these are mobile devices, and even though I charge mine at the end of the day before I go to sleep, I'd still like to be able to get through the day without lugging extended battery packs.
Why not? Multi-core was marketed successfully for PCs, what makes smartphones any different? Tech specs are pretty important to the Android crowd. Besides, now that certain devices will have docks that allow them become netbook and HTPC replacements, people will find uses for that extra core.
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Considering my phone screen is 65%-85% of the battery, I am not too worried about a dual core.
Also, I imagine with the ability to kill off cores when not needed a slower dual-core could use less than a single core, and run better.
The iPad has massive battery because of the screen, which I bet is over 90% of the power used. Especially in one that is being used as a browser tablet without 3G (less going on when not being used).
My current (4 hours since unplugged, not too much usage today vs a normal morning) has 65% display, 10% cell standby, 8% phone idle as the top 3. Not having the phone function would save 10% of my battery, but still the screen is the real killer. And on a typical day I use the screen a lot more in the morning.
This is Tmobile G2 for reference.
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two cores on lower clock rate may consume less energy than one core with fast clocking. energy use is proportional to the square of the clock rate, so it's a matter of tuning to achieve lower power. the only question is whether the slow cores will be fast enough for the important sequential tasks (if there are such at all).
Umm... the Android G1 had a 524Mhz Qualcomm processor and that was 2008. The first Android phone to come out with a 1Ghz Snapdragon was the Nexus One, and that wasn't until January 2010. And as far as current-gen Android phones having a 1.2Ghz processor, none of those have been released yet. All Android phones released in 2010 were capped at 1Ghz with chips from either Qualcomm or Samsung. The Samsung Infuse 4G is the first phone I'm aware of that at stock is greater than 1Ghz (it is 1.2Ghz).
As for battery life, I'd like to direct you to this white paper: http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_papers/Benefits-of-Multi-core-CPUs-in-Mobile-Devices_Ver1.2.pdf
Sure it's written by nVidia, but I doubt they are allowed to flat out lie, as that's some pretty bad PR. And it's the whole theory behind having dual cores in laptops anyway. 2 cores running at a lower clock speed is more power efficient than running one core at a higher clock speed.
iOS only supports true multitasking for a limited number of applications (phone, music player, voip, etc ...) , for everything else is it's not multitasking but swapping out programs left and right.
Oh god... you can't be suggesting that they're going to FRAGMENT the number of cores? IPhone users will hate that.
Dual core with a dual battery would be nice
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
1) The same argument was made before dual core made it to consumer PCs. If you build it, they will come.
:)
In any case, waiting on either PC or phone is usually due to some IO task, not heavy CPU usage. By far, the most waiting I'm going to be doing is when web pages are being loaded.
Media playback and games are primarily where users will see the most benefit from dual-core in the foreseeable future. Having a heavy webpage with Flash running smoothly doesn't hurt either.
2) Today, chips have very good power-gating. If only one core is being used, only one core is being powered. Also, the power usage increase is logarithmic. For this reason, having a second core doesn't double the TDP of the entire chip.
Also, most of these dual-core chips add a fraction of die space in return for an extra core. The SOCs already only dedicate a minority of space to the ARM core- the rest is taken up by the GPU, Memory, radio, and other misc controllers.
And due to die shrinkages with every generation, many dual-core chips will be drawing less power than their single-core counterparts. Case in point: the 3rd generation Snapdragon with dual-Scorpion cores is claimed (at least by Qualcomm) to use less power than the Snapdragons in current smartphones. Going from 65nm to 45nm (28nm expected by end of 2011!) provides that kind of headroom.
Besides, the biggest user of battery space is usually the screen, then radio (wifi, 3G/4G, bluetooth, etc), then the CPU at a distant third.
Double core- Double battery usage? Right, whatever.
Sigs are for losers
ESPECIALLY now that iOS supports multitasking
iOS has always supported multitasking. Run top on an old iPhone and you'll see lots of system daemons running in the background. It did not support more than one GUI application running at once, but this was due to memory constraints, not due to lack of CPU power. GUI apps tend to eat a load of RAM and the iPhone does not support swapping (well, actually, the kernel does, but you need to jailbreak it, install a terminal, and then turn it on). If you run more than one app, the others have to be aware of the increased memory constraints. This is less of a problem on the newer models, with more RAM, and will be irrelevant in a year or two when they all come with 2GB or so.
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