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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."
Is this so when you have your main task going, there are 3 more cores to eat up battery power in the background?
...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.
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...!".
Ray? Is that you?
I am Spartacus
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.
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.
The problem is, the simpler the application, the less it benefits from parallelization. So long as serial applications don't take a serious performance hit this is a good idea.
I am Spartacus
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.
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.
Yeah. Imagine, if you will, that capacity will double every 1.5 to 2 years. 10 Years from now, we'll have phones that are 30+ times faster than what we have now. With that hardware, who needs PC's?
Just put the phone on a dock and use the attached screen/keyboard/mouse as your computer. PC's will go the way of the workstation for professionals and enthusiasts. That's why Microsoft is desperately clawing its way back into the mobile OS.
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.'"
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.
my smartphone will replace my desktop probably around the same time my bicycle gets a V6, power steering, awd, a nice stereo, and can tow a trailer.
What's wrong with having different tools for different jobs?
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.
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
We'll need PCs because we'll have programs that have requirements 100x higher than what we have now.
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 !
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.
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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.
Power Management, duh. In order to power down the other 3 cores to save battery life.
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
The dual cores already on the market address that issue, though. For UI zippiness, a quad core processor won't really help much more than a dual core processor... you just need one processor to handle the background apps, and one to handle the foreground.
Multi-tasking on a phone is kind of a non-issue... the phone screen simply doesn't provide enough real estate to be worth running an app that isn't full screen, and even the "dock" devices like the one with the new Motorola Atrix phone only has 1366x768 resolution on its 11" screen. Better than a netbook, yes, but not really good enough to do a lot of serious multitasking. Usual caveats about statements about being "enough for anybody", but until phones have enough processing power to replace a full desktop, there really isn't any need for more than a dual core phone... and for me, phones will never be able to replace a full desktop (or high end gaming laptop), because I like being able to play modern video games. Give it a few years, though, and the non-gamer facebook generation will be fine with just a cell phone that docks to a laptop-like device with full keyboard and mouse. Of course, most of 'em won't buy one, because they'd rather have a laptop. :)
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.
"Just put the phone on a dock and use the attached screen/keyboard/mouse as your computer."
That's called the Motorola Atrix.
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.
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.
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
Singular applications will take advantage of the extra cores
Only if they've been properly signed. Singular is not fond of unknown sourses.
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?
but until phones have enough processing power to replace a full desktop
A 2.5GHz quad-core snapdragon sounds like it would easily compete with the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo in my (work) desktop. And I've always got at least 4-5 applications open plus 10-20 terminal tabs. Of course I doubt whatever they're putting in these things would keep up with my video board. But certainly I could see chips of this class enabling smartphones that can function as real desktops when plugged into KVM.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Phones today are already more powerful than PCs from a few years ago, and with the exception of a few small niches most people aren't doing things on their PCs which weren't possible years ago on hardware of a similar spec to todays smartphones...
The problem, is ever increasing software bloat.
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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
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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.
Sooner or later, someone is going to finally achieve the long-held dream of portable computing: A high-resolution display that can be worn like glasses, overlaying the image onto the user's vision.
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.
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.
Is Bill O' as good?
Take him off his meds. If that doesn't do the job a weekend immersion training with Charlie Sheen* should have him ranting** along nicely...
*abusable substances available on a cost plus basis
**resulting rants not guaranteed entertaining
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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...
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)
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.
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?
On the other hand, terminals and telegrams have progressed nicely. What's the point of having lines longer than 50 characters wide, wrapping, etc. if you're not going to use them?
Right, but I'm sure above poster is implying that said docked device will actually work properly.
While that's true, you do realise that batteries and processors are designed/made by different groups (often in different companies), and so both can be worked on (and are being worked on) at the same time, right? This isn't an either/or situation.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
You'll run that on the cloud, where you'll have access to 1000x the performance any desktop could give you.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
We've already seen micro projectors built into devices this small for video output and projecting virtual keyboards on a flat surface. Using Kinnect-style algorithms, one could use the phones camera for tracking fingers moving over a keyboard printed on a sheet of paper
As far as near-future devices are concerned, I'm sure there is a large market out their for sunglasses that incorporate displays (private viewing, 3D graphics, augmented reality, etc.) or input devices possible with current technology or that currently have a small specialized market (e.g. ring for tracking finger motion, eyeball trackers, implanted neural interfaces, etc).
science is a religion
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...
At least based on SPECint benchmarks, ARM is substantially slower than Atom at the same clock speed, and C2D is years beyond Atom. A quad Snapdragon might be only 20-30% slower for properly threaded integer code, but it would be hugely slower on floating point and on the most important factor: memory and I/O bandwidth.
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.
but mostly (read: efficient) parallel code is still the domain of humans
Since when are processors developed to run efficient code? Processors manufacturers have been chasing the ability to run spaghetti code extremely fast for the last full decade. What do you think branch prediction is for?
It's actually a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point... back before CPUs were spaghetti-code optimized, good coders knew how to use function pointers, and poor coders instead produced giant towers of conditionals. Now good coders are starting to find that they need to avoid function pointers to take advantage of branch prediction, because the CPUs get slow if you don't give them lots of conditionals with fixed addresses.
Anyway, VMs are a perfect spot to put compiler-generated parallelism, and can do so even with a lot of code that appears to be sequential at the source code level. OpenMP is hardly the only way parallelism is done these days.
Someone had to do it.
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.
"you just need one processor to handle running code, and one to handle the garbage collection"
FTFY
Multi-processor systems have little or nothing to do with the number of apps the user is concurrently running, and everything to do with division of labor within those applications and the supporting OS environment.
The trend is towards multi-core systems that have the same basic instruction set, but where each core has some special capabilities, like having fast access to the display, or doing higher math, or doing lots and lots of vector crunching or crypto.
Someone had to do it.
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
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?
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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.
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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.
These little processors use significantly less power than the screen, or even the radio link on a smartphone. Adding cores and shrinking the SOC is still an overall power win... witness the dual-core tablets that are getting the same battery life from the usual 24-25Ah battery that powered last year's tablets. But unless they deal with the screen, and perhaps the growning demand for GPU power, even a zero power CPU is not going give you a 24hr battery life.
-Dave Haynie
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.
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.
Except for latency, which isn't going anywhere because the speed of light doesn't change.
And let's face it, if you can command that much performance in the cloud for little money, hackers can too. Your data won't be secure unless it's on hardware you control.
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.
A few years back, my wife took a picture of a Cray-1 with her first generation iPhone. The only possible superiority the Cray might have had is parallel floating-point multiplication; I don't know enough about iPhone video to know if it can do that too.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
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.
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
" 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....
call somebody?? Maybe 4 people at the same time with quad core?
Privacy is terrorism.
sure you could do that , or you could finally do it right and read and actually implement in several prototype current patches for popular app's , video,audio,streaming,encoding etc from Brinch Hansen's paper's back when paper's really did solve practical problem's http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrinch-hansen.net%2Fpapers%2F1995d.pdf
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrinch-hansen.net%2Fpapers%2F1995e.pdf
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrinch-hansen.net%2Fpapers%2F1978a.pdf
etc....
Latency to the local cloud is largely irrelevant. As long as it falls below the threshold of human perception, what tiny fraction of applications is going to care? Not even an FPS game is that sensitive.
Your data is certainly going to be less secure on hardware you control than on hardware in the cloud, barring your being a one-in-a-million security expert. That's a small market for those desktops.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
640k is enough memory for this author.