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Quad-Core Mobile Chips Wasted On Mobiles?
An anonymous reader writes "Dual-core smartphones have only just hit the market, but mobile chipmakers Nvidia and Qualcomm are already turning their attention to quad-core chips. While it looks certain that tablets will be the first quad-core mobile devices in the market, chipmakers reckon they'll land in smartphones too. But do smartphones need quad-core chips? There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do. I'm interested to hear what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable"
Faster posting on /. ?
@work @school @InTheCar
There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
Yep true, if everything's locked up.
But provide that amount of power in an open system and there'll be people who'll find beautiful ways of suing it.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's not about how many apps someone is using at once. It's about how good the compilers/vm's for those apps are. A good compiler/vm should generate parallel code, even if the developer has not explicitly threaded it.
Multiple core processors will make smartphones even more like small computers, which, over time, will become more like medium computers, which over time will become more like supercomputers. All in your pocket/purse.
Is this so when you have your main task going, there are 3 more cores to eat up battery power in the background?
If there's one complaint I've had about any smartphone I've owned it's that they aren't snappy enough. I'm sure that these chips could certainly help in that department, and if we aren't sacrificing something such as battery life it then why not?
...anything more than 512KB of RAM is wasted on smartphones, too?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Assuming the autonomy is good, having more cores means more multitasking without impacting the phone's snappiness and perceived user performance. As memory increases in phones, more cores will be quite useful for background apps.
Quake3 or Unreal3 powered games ....
Folding@Phone. What could be more obvious??? It would also offer an incentive to manufacturers to provide longer lasting batteries!
I am Spartacus
I use Spotify on my Android phone (Samsung i5700). Even with the tracks synced to my SD card, the music can stutter if you're trying to browse the web at the same time as listening to music. Streaming over wifi and browsing is completely useless. I'm assuming that there are overheads inherent in the data reception and processing that cause this, and thus dual-core makes sense. Quad-core? I guess it's the same issue as found with full-fat PC CPUs - is Quad-core that helpful unless you have programs that can utilise the extra available threads? Another factor could be energy-efficiency - is it more efficient to have extra cores that can switch themselves off when not required, or have fewer cores that are sometimes overwhelmed? There's marketing in there too of course: "Hey, my phone's got more cores than your laptop...!".
Why didn't we stop at just phones, why smartphones?
Why didn't we stop at just servers, why super-computers?
It's just that how we evolved.
If power grows super-linearly with clock speed, then running software on 4 cores at 250 MHz will consume less power than running on 1 core at 1 GHz.
Provided that 3 of the 4 cores can be turned off to save power what is the downside? Chip makers have been getting very efficient at power saving, so if we can get more performance without increasing the power consumption I say go for it. Games will benefit for sure, as well web browsing with flash.
Why assume a smart phone needs less cores than a desktop? If the smart phone is going to replace the desktop it will need cores.
I remember when my dad came home from college one day and was amazed that one of the university tech admins had gotten a 1Gb HDD. His comment was "What would you ever do with that much storage space?"
If the technology is available someone will find a cool new way to exploit it.
Since when have multiple cores been geared purely for Multitasking?
4-cores, or rather 4 hardware threads, can be utilised by a single app, it just depends on what you're doing. THe real thing to keep in mind is battery life. Having 4 cores going at 100% will drain the battery, sure, but compare that against 4 cores doing a task in 1s that a single core takes 5 or 6 seconds to do. The faster a job gets done, the less juice that's used. There's every reason to look forward to the coming multi-core devices you can fit in your pocket.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Okay, so it doesn't apply to anybody on /., but for plenty of people, the idea of carrying their primary computing platform in their pocket is awesome. All they need is the ability for it to play nicely with a wireless keyboard/mouse and their big-ass TV, and they've suddenly got a home computer, with all their data stored up in the cloud.
How else are we supposed to play Angry birds while simultaneously listening to music downloading apps and filming in HD ? I can't wait to have to charge my phone every 4 hours !
Quad core processors will primarily provide better battery life. Most designs will feature cores of mixed processing power allowing most of the chip to be fully powered down when idle or just doing baseband event handling.
When there is real work required firing up the rest of the chip will allow for tasks to be completed very quickly. Once complete the processor can again be ramped back down to a low power state.
You can now play Angry Birds while making an emergency phone call! Remember to let your operator know you are playing and you get 5 minutes shaved off the ambulance deployment time, courtesy of Rovio.
Singular applications will take advantage of the extra cores for increased processing power in process heavy applications like games and web browsers.
An important thing to realize is that multi-tasking is NOT the same thing as as an app/OS being multi-threaded. While most apps need to be specifically coded to be multi-threaded, operating systems for a long time have had the ability to take advantage of multiple CPUs to complete tasks. Now, while a big jump in a single application may come from taking a huge CPU task and chopping it up into little pieces, there are definitely some tasks that lend themselves very easily to being multi-threaded. For example, probably the most important one is independently-executed Javascript threads. Browser performance can really be improved from multiple CPUs chewing on Javascript threads and then powering down to a low power state. Now, will it really matter when most of the wait for a page loading is downloading images? Probably not, but better performance is still better performance. The key goal with dual/quad core chips is making sure the system itself still feels responsive when doing tasks. A good example of this is if you have an iPhone and you are listening to a video podcast while running Safari, the system will definitely see some slowdown. Or running any app while the OS is installing something from the App Store, uploading a photo to Flickr in the background, or streaming Pandora. As refined as smartphones seem, they are still just pocket computers with limited resources.
I will use it in ways that even I cannot now foresee. The reason general-purpose computers are so useful is because they can be used in ways that were not foreseen by the manufacturer. Please stop trying to determine how I will use my equipment. Just make it powerful and stop trying to lock me down to a particular usage scenario.
I would love to be able to download stuff in the background (pdfs, music, movies, whatever), respond to texts as they come up, play a game, pause it because I got a thought, jump over to my browser and look something up, jump back to my game, get a call and answer it all without any background threads having to "sleep" or whatever. I would utilize it.
it depends on what the phone is doing. if it is considered a mobile computing hub, it could be running tethering/routing SW for a user's wi-fi tablet, running an IM/twitter client, handling voice commands for the whole device and maybe even making a phone call. of course, power mgmt to handle all of this at the same time becomes critical. with more cores, voice/video call handling becomes less of a priority and keeping the user connected at all times with background tasks becomes more of the device's function.
When I plug something like an Atrix into the laptop adapter, I'd like to have a little processing horsepower to go with my keyboard, mouse and 14" display.
When I plug something like an Atrix into the docking bay on a television, I'd like to have a little processing horsepower to go with my keyboard, mouse and 55" display.
More is better. More is always better. More choice. More freedom. More power. That's how it works.
Well... in America at least.
How else will we play Crysis??
I hope we don't find ourselves in a situation as we do with full-size computers where ads and sales-droids are telling us that SuperMultiCore Machine X is "perfect for email, web browsing and organizing your recipe collection". I don't want to see multicore phones trying to make up for sloppy coding and configuration.
With more cores, this will also add a benefit because apps that don't multithread will use one core's CPU time, while other cores are not affected. Say a MP3 player is using one core to play music. The user fires up another task, and instead of taking CPU time away from the MP3 player (possibly causing skipping), it will use another core that is not as utilized.
So, overall, even if cores are disabled and enabled for power saving reasons, having more of them will provide better overall user responsiveness for a device.
Best of all would be asymmetric cores. Have a few cores which are low power that run the kernel and the OS, a few cores which are powered up for relatively CPU intensive tasks, a core or two for the radio, a core for security tasks (TPM, etc.), and a couple GPU cores. This would provide the best of all worlds -- low power CPU usage for the idle OS, while giving the oomph enough to play the latest mobile version of Crysis.
When your phone can run LibreOffice, the Gimp, Inkscape, and so on, and also do 1080p output via MiniHDMI, you're going to want a quad-core with a nice GPU. So what if you're not using the power when you're carrying the phone around? Hook it up to your TV at home and bam! You've just saved yourself from buying a whole other device. Likewise in the car, there's your navigation and entertainment. Take it to work and do your personal crap on it so as not to mix it with the work systems. Most people never do anything but websurf and watch video so such a phone could feasibly replace their desktop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I want to be able to run SETI on my phone. I want it to be solar powered too.
Currently, the Nvidia Tegra 2 chip has 8 cores. A high powered dual core A9-cortex ARM chip, a low powered A7 (for idle state and handling other low power interrupts), a core for HD video encode, a core for HD video decode, a core for audio, and a GPU. Though it lacks the Neon instruction set for full performance SIMD.
OpenCL is currently on its way into the mobile world. Soon the mobile world will also make the transition into streaming multiprocessors. The thought of holding back these innovations is just ludicrous dribble. MIMD is soon going to replace rasterization with backwards rendering, which will require a high amount of complexity, which a quad core would be more ideal. Especially, if you want to exploit the heterogeneity of OpenCL with both the on board GPU and CPU. Maybe cloud rendering will eventually replace this, though I have my doubts. I want to be able to render my screen locally without connecting to the internets.
I hope to one day be able to run test simulations on my tablet while I am waiting in line for lunch, see the results, and then execute heavier distributed processes.
You actually can write a multi-threaded application for a phone. You can take advantage of a quad-core processor on a system only running one application.
One core running governmnent spyware. One core running phone maker's bloatware One core running MAFIAA trusted computing DRM/spyware One core running the user's apps.
Just wait, someday the industry will look back condescendingly at the day yet to come where some tech firm president says something like, '64 cores ought to be enough for anybody.'
Aside from that, streaming a hi-def movie while talking over VOIP with an IRC bot running, a couple of open spreadsheets, and several open Word documents in the background will be far snappier with a quad-core.
Not to mention mobile games. Phones will shortly be the new handheld gaming devinces and users will want to be able to plug them into their large screen HD TVs and still get full screen HD graphics.
cool
After playing with a Motorola Atrix with the 'PC dock' at a phone store, I really felt like it was the next big step for smartphones. Having a powerful smartphone is one thing, but it remains restricted by limited screen real estate and lousy text entry methods. Being able to expand it into a full PC via HDMI and Bluetooth keyboard 'n mouse is really quite impressive. The only complaint I had about using the Atrix as a PC was that it was sluggish, perhaps something a quad-core CPU could fix, no?
Made with massively parallel wetware.
:) I almost feel like the TS is a troll.
Who cares what kind of real world use it has? Give someone the choice between a phone with 5MP camera and a 6MP camera and more is always better, regardless of actual picture quality. Same with cores. The only thing more effective from a marketing standpoint is giving a fancy new name to existing technology. Your typical consumer is an easily-gamed moron.
Similes are like metaphors
All things considered, the power used by a CPU increases with the square of the clockspeed. So yes, more cores let you get more more work at lower overall clock speeds than would be required if all processes were using the same core and running it faster/hotter. More cores can and does equal less overall power used.
I'd love to see smartphones that have encryption built in to everything. Encrypted HD, encrypted communication. Really, they should enable encrypted phone calls, texting, emailing, etc. And the more cores the phone has, the more viable this is (as most users won't stand for it if it makes a phone super slow).
Imagine: One core for the phone and three cores transparently decompressing the battery in the background. You'd get three times the battery life !
Finally a smartphone with a battery lasting a full week !
so is bitcoin legal?
Haven't we been reading the articles about how malware has been ramping up on mobiles? Isn't it obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to limit a program's access is to jail it or otherwise virtualize it? And just because *your* smartphone won't let you multitask doesn't mean that mine won't. Having multiple cores (that can be turned off to save power when not needed) would be very handy, thank you very much.
Nathan's blog
You need one core for each finger, so if you want four-finger gesturing you need four cores. If you only have one core, you get the finger.
That is why my 8-core imac is soo cool, I have two magic mice - one per hand, and a magic trackpad for each foot; I can type with my nose, and still have 3 cores to spare in case one breaks down.
somebody slap the OP.
We are moving towards a future without laptops and desktop PCs. Power-users will of course keep home desktops for some time to come, but your average joe-shmoe would be happy to replace his current laptop with a powerful mobile device. There is no need to tether when you get home if the thing you would be tethering to is the same thing you carry around in your pocket all day.
I predict a future where the only people who have desktops or laptops at home are people in the multimedia business or PC gaming. Everyone else will just have a smartphone with a wireless keyboard and use their home television as a monitor.
what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable
Games & porn--what else has ever driven development on any platform?
What smart phones really need are more memory, faster flash memory access and not to have their batteries die after 5 seconds of use.
I was under the impression that developing more cores with a lower clock speed will enable the same computing power while using less energy, thus extending battery time. In any case to say anything is to much power or a waste is laughable at best. I remember my dad bought a computer (years ago) from a guy with 12Gb storage, and I said that sound pretty low, he told me he'll never be able to fill that, a year later we bought an 80Gb Hdd, and today terabytes seem endless. Friend's may I remind you of a few other computer quotes from some well known folks.
“I think there’s a world market for about 5 computers.”
(Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948)
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
(Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
(Bill Gates, 1981)
“Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need.”
(Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992)
“In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.”
– Popular mechanics, 1949
Power Management, duh. In order to power down the other 3 cores to save battery life.
As I see more and more normal consumers jumping on the "early" adapter bandwagon (upgrading hardware at every new model at any cost), it surely must be to compensate for inadequacies in other aspects of their miserable lives. I am not upgrading this time round, still not enough cores for a poor, socially inept geek like me.
When a man has more processor cores in his pocket than he has testicles, I truly believe we've reached the apex of epistemological closure within the mobile computing arena. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
We suggest a few weeks watching either Glen Beck or American Idol.
And what after Glenn Beck leaves Fox News Channel, as he has recently announced? Is Bill O' as good?
Just about any application involving computer vision will gobble up as many cores as you throw at it. Think face recognition, product recognition, augmented reality, computational photography, and so on. The list of conceived but not yet commercialized vision-related applications is rather long.
You could render Toy Story IV on the bus ride.
Bingo. It's for video gaming. Smartphone makers have to find some way to compete with the 3DS and NGP, and multiple computing cores (some CPU-like, some GPU-like) are one way to improve graphics closer to Xbox 360 levels.
especially when zooming or scrolling through complex layouts
and three for the A.P.P.L.E. (Apple PoLice Policy Enforcement)...
I think it would more beneficial to ramp up GHz first rather than having more cores. Which would you rather have? A 4GHz mobile CPU or 4 1GHz CPUs? The answer is easily 4GHz since every single interaction, graphics update, processing of user input is going to be 4X more responsive, and you will easily notice the difference, with multiple cores you also have the overhead and hassle of synchronizing threads and the mind numbing task of updating mobile apps to take advantage of them. The ONLY reason we have more cores on the desktop is because we reached a ceiling for clock rate and heat dissipation, until that happens on the mobile CPU there is absolutely no reason to favor cores over clock rate, in fact even less so than the desktop since responsiveness is even more important.
Obviously the dual core iPad was for the nine times increase in GRAPHiCAL POWER. Not for an overall increase in iPad speed functionality. If it was the case for the overall power, then the increase of speed Apple would have focused on would have been higher than 2x and gfx power would have been lower than 9x.
Epic's view of the iPad is that it'll replace consoles. I think we can all agree that the iPad gaming platform is comfortable in one way or another over all other devices. But that's also the other way around for all other devices.
Battery technology is progessing in slow motion.
What's the point of bigger processors if you
can't use them to their full potential because the
battery won't last?
While I agree that there is only so much you can really do with any level of practicality on a smartphone, the tablet and mid markets would benefit. IMHO the tablet market if taken advantage of could be a renaissance for tech companies. Computer and even console advancement while progressing from a tech standpoint has stagnated a bit on the consumer side, for basic functionality there is little difference to an end user from a 6 year old p4 and a modern quad core as far as the user experience goes mainly because mainstream computers are still using integrated graphics and much software still isnt taking advantage of multicores. Leapfrogging technologies like those in the Xoom and Ipad 2 are more easily demonstrable to end users and create the kind of buyer envy that used to exist when another couple hundreds of megahertz in performance actually made a noticeable difference.
I'm going to make it do math... lot's of math. That's right it will get nice and warm and keep my hands from freezing in cold weather. Battery life be damned!
Get a web developer
I can think of three areas which can benefit from more cores:
Calling
Camera
Filesystem Tasks
Calling is a duh, as I think that all phone functions should be prioritized... but camera would be nice because too many times I have pulled out my phone to capture something quick and had to:
Unlock my phone,
Wait for the homescreen to load,
start the camera app,
wait for the camera to initialize
autofocus,
take the picture.
A dedicated core doing nothing but camera functions would be something I could really get behind. Maybe not even need to wake up the phone for so I could skip the first three steps up there.
Singular applications will take advantage of the extra cores
Only if they've been properly signed. Singular is not fond of unknown sourses.
I actually need a good quad core in smart phones for what I need to do!
Seriously! This is not a joke.
This is actually holding up several projects because there isn't enough capacity in that platform.
2 cores CPU for basic program use - Example: Pandora and Email checking at the same time
Another core, cut down on functionality for "phone use". This includes GPS, tower connections, and actual phone use. This is useful for location based apps. This would not normally share with the primary CPU cores, but mixing it into a "multi-core" architecture would free up space in devices for future technologies, faster / better hard drives, longer lasting batteries, or even things like solar power or kinetic power generators (watches that you shake a bit to power, or the shake powered flashlights) hardware to help keep things alive longer
Another "core" - GPU
Right there we instantly have a "quad-core" setup where you can hopefully integrate a lot of technology onto a single chip in such a way that you can lower battery needs, free up space in the very limited size of these mobile devices. The GPU / satellite & antenna / CPU portions would work independently so that they don't hold up the software
Does this actually use a "quad-core" in the traditional sense that many of us are thinking about it? No. But it does allow for growth into a system where a single "chip" can hold many tasks/jobs/hats independently and effectively. Eventually with more gaming and advanced programs, multi-core technologies (traditional multi-core CPU as we normally think of it now) built into single apps will become more common as well
Quad cores could save battery life. The idea is to wake up and sleep cores as they are needed to perform functions. This means that most of the time, 75 percent of the processor could be shut down while idling or just playing music. Then you want to run an app, you wake up as many cores as are needed for the task. The more cores you have, the more you can fit the battery drain to the tasks the phone is being asked to perform.
Furthermore, these phones will increasingly be used as computers. All you need is a virtual desktop, and we can begin doing most of the work we use laptops for today on the phones themselves. And all that will be needed is maybe a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a monitor to plug into the phone (or we will use the led projection built into the phone and a wall) (or we will just remote to a virtual desktop from a desktop or laptop system) (or we will do something else better).
The processing power we will want in a phone will not decrease. The number of sensors we will want in a phone will not decrease. By the end of the evolution of the phone what we will really have is a much smaller, handier Tricorder.
What about hybrid devices?
Our iPad app does high quality monophonic formant preservation pitch shifting (not re-sampling)... more cores = higher fidelity, polyphony, more FX buses, more real time DSP.
Want!
When it comes to music software in general, the more cores the better.
HTPC's, for example. I'd love to get my hands on any multi-core handset chip, the nVidia Tegra 2, for example. With the kind of processing power they pack nowadays, it would make for a great, fairly cheap, hardware-decoding, cool & quiet little living room box. If only they'd sell these chips to the consumer market...
Right. And if you drive home faster you use less fuel. Not.
Because the wind resistance when using all four cores is so high????
Seriously, it's the whole point of these new l33t aerodynamic cases. My 1600W power supply would have been way more efficient if I had an edgier case... and maybe glowiness and a see-thru panel.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
The theme of this is exactly the same as it was with all the articles preceding quad core desktop cpu's. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
It would enable the carriers to charge people for a not needed upgrade.
need.
Quote me on that.
They also will only need 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, and maybe an 8-threaded Nvidia GPU.
And maybe Flash. Some day.
Turns our 640k of RAM wasn't enough after all, but those people were just stupid.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What freakin' hillbilly wrote this.
Writer of article: "I reckon we aught go get us a snow cone billy bob, what you think cletus?"
Cletus: "I aint want no snow cone Jed"
come on slashdot
"No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."
I'd rather not be narrow minded and not say "it's not needed." Give developers the extra power and they'll find ways to use it. Granted, today's applications wouldn't benefit from it. But apps evolve in complexity over time.
It turns out you can save a lot of energy by having modern multi-core processors handle the same work-load as a single core because they can clock down and use lower voltages. Two cores running at 550MHz each use 40% less energy than one core running at 1GHz. Similar power savings can be made with 4 cores running at lower speeds and lower voltages on multithreaded workloads.
The iPhone already uses four ARM cores, doesn't it? Integrating onto one chip is hardly a shattering difference.
1 core can be running my browser or other interactive program another core can be used by a music player while the third manages the phone itself, the connection to the cell tower, etc...
Of course 1 core can do all that at once buy maybe 3 will do it snappier?
Unless of course it is an Apple phone. Then you don't get to do all that at once...
I would use the quad core to run background scans on Wi-FI add better security that would not impede performance. Secondly it could be a mini lab that i could use on the go - running tools like Ettercap and the like.
I think that the mobile Quad core will be a niche market, but what isn't these days.
my 2cents. for what its worth.
The major problem still out there is Programmers need to write their applications to support SMP.(Symmetric multiprocessing)
Sure I loved my Dual Pentium 2 and 3 boards back in the day. You would always see one CPU idle Unless you were running multiple Applications.(multiple tasks at once)
But, if you want to get the most performance with one program it needs to be programmed the correctly to use all these core efficiently. Like the way you use the MPI and MPI v2 Libraries for Clusters. (Message Passing Interface)
What a stupid article. Just let technology take its course, even if it means ten core mobile phones the size of paperclips. Fucking luddites.
At any given minute of the day, your smartphone is
- Synching email from the cloud .... etc etc.
- Pushing up your last Evernote from 5 minutes ago into the cloud
- Checking for new picassa photos
- Updating your GPS nav app's position
- Updating all your home-screen widgets, of which there might be as many as 12 or 15
- Streaming background music
- Checking for application updates
And this is not even anything involving user-interaction yet. Now let's swap out the GPS nav app for a 3D high-definition game, which needs a dual-core Tegra2 just to run smoothly... you still need to keep up with all these background tasks while playing the game, and for the user, it would be nice if they did not cause the game to jump or skip.
I've never engineered any silicon, and don't really do much multithreading as my job doesn't require that sort of performance optimization, but Wovel brings up a good point. Multi-threading allows for developers to minimize bottlenecks and help maintain smooth operation even while other programs are choking up a processor. It also allows for some nice energy saving options. If you have a multi-core computer, you can turn on the resource monitor (or run one of many programs) and see that most of the time, unless gaming, rendering or doing something extremely CPU intensive, half of your cores (one out of each pair) is put to sleep (I don't know if that's the proper term for it.). Voila, more battery life with the ability to ramp up the processing if your trying to stream 720p video or play Duke Nukem Forever on your phone, or run the 5 apps you want to run simultaneously, or what ever it is you are doing that you need that much juice.
Also, multi-core does not corelate to multi-tasking. CPU multi-tasking has nothing (well, little) to do with multi-core processors. mutli-tasking is a function of the operating system. Mutliple cores allows a programmer to perform asyncronous tasks to speed up and optimize their program. Multi-core processors have a lot of other implications, but that's the gist of it.
...anything more than 512KB of RAM is wasted on smartphones, too?
512KB should be fine for a good many people, but 640KB ought to be enough for anybody..
(Cue the 13 pedants reminding us that, no, BillG did not, in fact, ever say those words.)
Alas, the last time we talked about this, I don't think there was a Slashdot yet, so I can't link to it so that you can go through all the detailed arguments. But I do remember the outcome.
Anyway, to sum it up, the consensus seemed to be that the 80386 will be useful on servers, but yes, it would be totally wasted on individual users.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Multicore doesn't necessarily mean that you want more speed. A quad core processor may be no faster than a single core processor with the same number of transistors, but you can turn off three of the four cores when you don't need them to save power. Multicore processors are also potentially easier to manufacture because you just manufacture an extra core and then keep the four cores that work best out of the five.
This is great news for Windows Mobile - two more cores to run the required antivirus on! ;)
Your smartphone is a mobile computer that also makes phone calls. I'm using my Samsung Captivate (with CyanogenMod thank you very much) more and more for things I used to depend on my home PC for.
While I think the Motorola Atrix is a bit of an overpriced dud, I think that this type of device is the future. 'Phones' are more and more going to be people's primary computing devices. I say bring on all the cores and memory they can handle. We'll make use of them when we dock the 'phone' at work or home to write a paper, surf the web, or play that cool new FPS.
Necron69
Please mod parent up. Although I haven't tried the Motorola Atrix 4G (which seems to have a Tegra 2 in it), this is where multi-core smartphones are right now.
Sure, in the not too distant future the wheel of reincarnation will make all those specialized cores transform into identical general-purpose cores. That's inevitable. But this chip helps improve battery life AND speed, right now.
> But do smartphones need quad-core chips? There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
Even if you're running a single application, that application can benefit greatly from operating system processes running concurrently.
I genuinely want my cell phone to be a thin client for a virtual machine - reducing power with the intent of the power source instead being leveraged for projected holographic monitors and projected surface keyboards. someone make this happen.
It's a matter of load balancing. My DroidX currently shows 23 background processes on one core. Two cores would be better. Four cores (assuming reasonable power management) would be even better. Multiple cores don't necessarily make individual tasks go faster; they provide more consistent response. Even non-techies will appreciate that, even if they don't quite understand why it's happening.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I find it disturbing that AC has intimate knowledge of Taco's Cock.
There Can Be Only One...
There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
yeah and bill gates once told us we'd never need more than 256kb of ram. idiot.
One CPU running with a clock of 1GHz consumes more power than 4 CPU running each with a clock of 250MHz in mobile handsets. High frequency clocks burn battery faster than Obama burns through the cash he has the treasury print.
Finally I'll be able to do SETI@home on my Android!
County DSP-like coprocessors is letting the marketdroids win. Tegra 2 is a dual-core processor, and a somewhat crippled one - OMAP4 outperforms it in just about every application.
The ordinary masses can now own their very own super computer for cheap! Enough said.
ID Software and ENIX are S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G for this! It's almost impossible to spooge modern 3d games properly on the chintz that's coming out now. Surely more speed is a good thing if the power consumption and battery characteristics (high current degradation effects) remain good. Why suggest rubbish handset is better than a better one?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Multiple cores isn't just about multitasking. It's about making programs run faster. One application can easily use multiple cores if it's written to do parallel work. And even if it isn't, basic libraries like OpenGL can take advantage of them.
Of course, you might ask, "Why does a phone need that much computing power?" The answer is, "It's not a phone. It's a pocket computer." We only call them "phones" for historical reasons.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
"Is that a computer in your pocket, or are you just happy you see me?"
"Good sexting is like good gaming. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."
"When choosing between two EVOs, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
Why would 4 cores be more than 4x faster than a single core? Cache.
Generally 4 cores is slower than a single core that is 4x as fast, but there can be exceptions where the effectively 4x as big L1 (sometimes L2) cache in the 4-core design makes it faster.
However, this isn't why four cores is a good thing in either a desktop or a server. The reason 4 cores is a good thing is that, given a fixed power envelope, you can only make a single core so fast. After that, it becomes both cheaper and more power efficient to build multiple cores than to try and build a really fast core. We've been in that space for a long time with servers (POWER4) and desktops (Athlon 64 X2), and we're realizing that the same thing makes sense for mobile processing. It's happening a lot faster with mobile because it's only ultra-low-power that allowed us to get into the mobile space in the first place, which makes upping the clock speed difficult.
Though I don't know any specifics, you probably pay a VERY small penalty for having extra turned-off cores on a mobile processor. The cores should be independently voltage and frequency controlled, and the clocks should be able to be stopped on an unused core. It may even be possible to turn off power to cores completely and have them wake back up in a clean state.
Leakage in a mobile processor is already going to be well-controlled, so the power cost of all that extra dormant silicon is going to be minimal. Overall, multi-core is the only way to significantly improve mobile performance, though it will take a fair amount of effort for the applications to be able to take advantage of it.
ditto
Thank's for trying to sell me a disposable $1k phone to be obsoleted in a year and costs $100+ a month in the meantime, but my $35 pay as you go phone works just fine and only costs me $8 a month.
Sheesh.
Personally i envision mobile phones and computers to more or less converge, atleast in functionality where i think they already has.
With for example Android Honeycomb in your phone it isnt all that far fetched to just hook it up to a screen, kbd and mouse and use it instead of your computer. With that kind of use a four core CPU fits really well into the equation. I think this is where things are heading today and i would be much surpised if some hardware people havent thought in the same ways.
HTTP/1.1 400
As computing power increases and gets smaller it allows new applications to be created. Imagine putting on your augmented reality glasses connected to your phone with wireless HD. The camera on the glasses sends video to the phone which does facial recognition on the people and displays info about them. When you're driving the glasses outline vehicles that you might otherwise not see. If the processing power is there; there will be someone who finds a way to use it.
Sounds like somebody is jealous
You get more power savings out of 4 cores than 2.
If the phone is being underutilized, you turn off the cores that aren't being utilized. If the user pulls switches away a game, or suddenly wants to play mp3's while they walk around with google maps (I've done this on a N95) with the GPS and WiFi on, you'll want to shift power to where it's needed.
When you only have 1 core, it's running, all the time, always consuming power, regardless of what's running. When you have 2 and 4, you can put everything on 1 core while the device is "idle" and spread it back out to 4 when in use for snappy performance. Or even stop threads when the user locks the keypad.
But that's the main thing about it. Just being able to turn the extra cores off to conserve power, just like turning wifi and the 3g radio off. I'd be pleased to no end if all the current Tablets included batteries that allowed for a 3-day runtime, not 10 hours. But realistically, who is going to use it that long between charges other than someone shmuck lost in a forest trying to get their maps to work?
a Java based phone seem like it has a 386 processor instead of one out of a calculator in it? Or have we found a level of aggravating slowness that we will always have to accept and they'll just keep bloating up processors that should be insanely fast on a phone but apparently can't be?
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
After we hit that ceiling, modern CPUs improved via work-done-per-clock-tick (& multicore).
- Long CPU pipelines that empty on branches were traded for predictive branching (compilers, Intel) or simultaneous branch execution (ARM).
- Caching has improved. ARM can drop to 16-bit mode in 1 instruction, so a smaller cache can still get more instructions in it.
When Intel first reached 3GHz, the 1.8GHz AMD chips often beat their benchmarks. That's where ARM chips are since they have nothing to prove by advertising high GHz to MFRs that know better. The JVM is experimenting with running single-threaded code on multiple cores now (by finding variable relationships and working around them). As long as the result is the same.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Augmented reality, smile detection, 3D processing will probably be application requiring high computation capabilities and will take benefice of Multicore and GPU capability on mobile chipset. Multitask is not a revolution is was already available on Windows 95 on single core processor ! ... /.
Benefice of multicore chipset is that some calculus can be process by several core at the same time to spread the workload. The drawback is power consumption.
But market see that iphone user accept to reload battery every day
So no really surprising that your next feature-smartphone-tablet-whatever phone will be more powerful that the computer your are/was currently using to read
Don't you see that? Just like 16MB cache HDD is twice faster than 8MB cache HDD. It's all magical.
I'm not sure how the myth that multiple cores can only be used when multitasking got started (maybe those Best Buy commercials saying you can burn a CD and surf the net at the same time with a dual core processor?), but the primary purpose of the entire shift to multiple cores is that most heavy lifting problems in any application where CPU consumption is non-trivial can be broken up into multiple parts which can be digested by multiple threads in the same process.
Also contrary to popular belief is that parallelization is difficult. How many of you have ever written a for loop? Were the results of each iteration of that loop inextricably linked to the previous iteration? Probably not, so learn OpenMP and start writing some parallel software.
McAffee or TrendMicro?
Quad core + low resolution + small screen. Raytracing might work with a decent fps.
n/t
The new Motorola ATRIX is an example of a smart phone that could use a Quad Core CPU. It has an add-on that acts like a netbook but it uses the phone as it's CPU. There are issues with pricing, etc., that makes the add-on impractical but it's where I see smart phones heading. At some point down the line I see the smart phone as your pimary computer. If you need to use it in a different format, such as a laptop, tablet, etc., you just plug it in to a slot and it becomes the CPU and storage for that device. In this scenario, having a quad-core CPU would be practical, even if only a single core is used when acting as a phone.
Thanks,
David
Seriously, you don't know what developers will do until the have the possibility in front of them. I've never seen someone complain about too much processing power. The only real concern is power consumption, but I'd hope that extra cores can be powered down when not needed.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
WTF? It's at least checking RSS feeds, discovering wifi networks, uploading GPS data, scanning for bluetooth devices, playing music, displaying the clock, receiving mail, shouting PONG to an IRC server, checking for twitter and facebook updates, receiving interrupts from the compass and the motion- and position sensors and sitting around on MSN. And then I haven't even taken it out of my pocket yet.
Once it comes out it's also supposed to display webpages with video content and multiple threads on them while responding to me touching the screen and downloading some files in the background while syncing/backupping. And then I haven't even mentioned any phone functions. Not that this cannot all be done on a single core, but it's perfectly reasonable to use a qua core processor for it.
0x or or snor perron?!
Would you still prefer one 4 GHz core to four 1 GHz cores if the former had significantly more power drain than the latter? And the former could not do as many ops per second as the latter? We went through this on the desktop. Scaling the speed leads to diminishing returns.
- Automatic translation on-the-fly
- Transcription logs
- voice encryption
All thjis would take advantage of 4 cores.
Thomas Watson, IBM 1943 - "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". And there's a Bill Gates quote I can't find that says something similar. 6 years ago, before the iPhone/smartphone revolution, you'd wonder who would ever want a dual-core chip in a phone. Now we can't make chips fast enough for the awesome games and apps coming out for the iPhone. Innovators will always figure out a way to use more computer power.
Geesus.... my iPhone 3G takes so long to respond to my typing on the on-screen keyboard, I hope they permanently assign one CPU just to respond to the touchscreen and update the text boxes.
I know it doesn't work like that, but for fsck's sake, I'm tired of having to wait to type in my google search for "pr0n"!
You can also run at lower clock speeds, which gives you better than a linear drop in power. So you can have the same performance with longer battery life.
Been wondering about practicality of shoving a OMAP4 (dual core) into mine-- with POP packaging, would potentially gain more RAM too. A fully utilized N900 could use a little more oomph. Not sure if pin compatible, and would have to be done by someone with way better soldering skills than mine.
Locked down phones are garbage. I have nearly every app on my phone that I run on my Debian desktop. With a twiddler keyboard, and an adapter cable, typing into the phone is as convenient as typing into my desktop.
of course a phone can use 4 cores. When phones take the place of laptop/desktops, I guarantee they'll be at least 4 cores!
Many moons ago, the exact same thing was said about Quad Core CPUs on desktops too. We have uses for quad core on the desktop now, but around the time Core 2 Quad was released, there was little use for them. It's very much a case of "build it, and they will come". If hardware provides four cores, it will get used. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough in the near future.
Lets not make more stupid assumptions. We dont know whats going to happen in the future. It is very realistic to see the todays PC disappear and we start using docked smartphones as our Primary PCs.
Motorola Atrix concept is perfect for this. It's not about the phone having 4 cores when you use it as a phone, but about having everything ready to go when you turn the device into Laptop/media centre mode... Universal devices are finally becoming a reality.
So it sounds like this is a step towards building the cloud. There's going to be lots of processing power and it's going to be all over the place. Soon your smart phone will be smart enough to think for someone else. But will the user decide who or what for?
With enough of these smart phones talking to one another, could their spare power be used in computational research, missile trajectory calculations, or predicting weather patterns? What sort of problems could be solved? Who would pay? And who would get payed?
Could the mere possession of such a device make one part the Skynet? Maybe it's a good thing that the batteries would die after so long..
Those extra cores could easily lend themselves to supporting on device virtualization. End to end encryption, as well as ultimate control over remote-wipe for business related functions and data is a no-brainer. Hell it wouldn't be that hard to let one of those cores be used for DLP.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
> There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
Multitasking is not the only way to use multiple cores.
I have never seen a computer that's close to fast enough, in any form factor. We get used to these delays inserted by machines throughout our lives, and phones are some of the worst offenders. Our expectations are too low. Every device should respond instantaneously. Every device should inspire that feeling you get driving a well-designed car, where the machine becomes an extension of your mind and body.
Here are some applications that could benefit from at least 10x more CPU than smartphones have today, and probably 100-1000x:
Finally catching up to the level of finish in animation that we saw in the iPhone 3G?
" I'm interested to hear what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable"
...
that's totally missing the real long term point of cortex , its not the smart phone , nit rather the form factor and far lower power for at full load on your desk that matters most
for instance the
http://armdevices.net/2011/03/03/trim-slice-tegra2-arm-cortex-a9-dual-core-desktop/
or even making the so dimm form factor instant plug in and power on popular
http://armdevices.net/2011/03/04/toradex-shows-tegra2-computer-on-so-dimm-form-factor/
and OC dont forget the lower power of your server
http://armdevices.net/2011/03/14/arm-powered-servers-designed-by-calxeda-could-be-10x-more-efficient-than-intel
ARM Powered servers designed by Calxeda could be 10x more efficient than Intel
Posted by Charbax – March 14, 2011
The SOC, as Calxeda will demonstrate with one of its reference designs, will enable OEMs to design servers as dense as 120 ARM quad-core nodes (480 cores) in a 2U enclosure, with an average consumption of about 5 watts per node (1.25 watts per core) including DRAM....
Any sort of multimedia app, in particular games, can take full advantage of as many cores as you can throw at them, otherwise games consoles would all be single core. Everything from video decompression to physics, ai, pathfinding, procedural geometry generation, audio dsp, particle systems and many more systems can be built to take advantage if multiple cores. There's always plenty of bus contention issues to deal with, but it's nothing that console develoers aren't completely familiar with already.
More cores = more async network transactions. If I have an app where there would be a performance benefit when doing a network request in the background (which I do), and more cores = more (truly) async tasks = more parallel requests = faster app = happy user, then of course I want more cores. In my smartphone, tablet, whatever.
call somebody?? Maybe 4 people at the same time with quad core?
Privacy is terrorism.
640k is enough memory for this author.
On 1/2 the personal computer. Talk about STUPID. Slap yourself for being that dumb, please. It might make you "snap outta it", lol! You're "penny-wise (not even) and definitely POUND foolish, for going Mac.