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Qualcomm Says Eight-Core Processors Are Dumb

Posted by Soulskill on from the also-hates-eight-cylinder-engines-and-eight-year-olds dept.

itwbennett writes "Following rival MediaTek's announcement of plans to release an eight-core processor in the fourth quarter, Qualcomm has declared eight-core processors 'dumb'. 'You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense,' Qualcomm's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said, according to a transcript of his comments to Taiwan media provided on Friday. Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"

17 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. The Onion said it best by Nimey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck everything, we're doing five blades.

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/ ...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
    1. Re:The Onion said it best by Dracos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More metal blades doesn't make a better razor after 2 or 3. After that, the manufacturers are just one-upping each other to keep the marketing going.

      I'd gladly pay much more for a razor with only two ceramic blades. But that'll never happen, because metal razor blades are by definition planned obsolescence.

    2. Re:The Onion said it best by HermMunster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I remember when 2 cores was considered dumb or even 2 cpus with their own dedicated ram. Those were specialty devices. I remember when 12 or 16mhz was fast. Who would need that speed? I remember when 32bit was unheard of, for that matter 16bit. No one would need that much power. And then hyperthreading, and multitasking and multithreading (well maybe we still haven't done much with that).

      The fact is that necessity is the mother of invention.

      We will also fill the void. I am not impressed with this Qualcomm exec's views. You can't take 4 cores and make a Corvette either, however we still have 4 cores in our phones and desktops. Think of Intel's multi-pentium core processor that beat the pants off anything anyone had produced to date. That had a very large number of cores. It's all in how you design and implement them. I understand the lessening return, however, if we had held that view the whole computer industry would have stagnated and dried up.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    3. Re:The Onion said it best by GNious · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually-having-facial-hair race here, and I've yet to see an electric razor able to come close to "smooth-as-sandpaper", let alone as smooth as a proper Wilkinson blade will do it.

    4. Re:The Onion said it best by Tridus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The problem is that workloads people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores. We've had this problem on PCs for a while, and it's one of the reasons the market is shrinking so fast. Once you have a dual core machine, more cores don't do anything for you given that most of your work is single threaded. There's nothing more annoying than waiting for something or seeing lag in a game with an i7 that never gets over 25% utilization (or 13% if you have hyperthreading enabled).

      He's not wrong. An eight core phone serves no purpose right now.

      --
      -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
    5. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You could be a man and grow a beard.

    6. Re:The Onion said it best by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well it *is* a parody of the news.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    7. Re:The Onion said it best by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I use cheap disposable single-bladed razors.

      Use once, throw away.

      $1 for 10 of them.

      Thank you very much.

      Sincerely, the Environment

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  2. qualcomm is right by Xicor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    eight core processors are dumb. though not for the reason he gave. they are dumb because nothing supports 8 cores, so 99% of the time, the extra 2-6 cores are totally wasted. if the software would catch up to the hard ware, we might see more use in 8+ cores

    1. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The reason he gave was one step ahead of that: even if you get apps that can use all eight cores, it's going to be murder on battery life, and most of the cost will be wasted (because most apps won't be using all that core power still.)

      --
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    2. Re:qualcomm is right by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would think that a highly multithreaded app combined with a highly parallel CPU would actually be more power efficient, as you're doing the same work in less clocks.

      Granted, all tasks cannot be highly multithreaded, but that particular street goes both ways.

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      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    3. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're just missing vision. Imagine Ubuntu Phone on an 8 core processor, you could have it run virtual machines and seamlessly switch between Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, IOS... who doesn't want that?

      Plus you'd still have enough oomph to run a torrent server, a tor node or just use your phone to mine some bitcoins.

      And your phone will be out of battery life by the time you unplug it and show up to work

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  3. Not that I disagree... by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...but every time some company says something is dumb, this usually means one of three things:

    1) Our competitor has too many patents so we can't make it
    2) We can't reach the quality/price of our competitor or
    3) Not the product is too dumb, we're just too dumb to produce it.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. Similar quote from Seymour Cray by Crash+McBang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

    --
    To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
  5. Cores matter depending on the software by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Software that's single-threaded, no it doesn't benefit from more cores. But modern heavily-multi-threaded software can benefit. More cores means more threads can execute simultaneously, and if the workload's heavily parallelized you can get it done quicker. No, you can't get a supercar engine from 8 lawnmower engines. But if I have a truckload of boxes to move into a warehouse, it'll go twice as fast with 8 normal guys who can carry 1 box per trip each than with 1 really strong guy who can carry 4 boxes per trip. And when you consider that with CPUs the really strong guy isn't 4x as strong as the normal guys, he's more like maybe 50% stronger, the performance improvement for the 8 guys is even better. Assuming of course that you've got individual boxes to move. If they're all packed up inside a shipping container and you have to move the entire shipping container, then yeah you need 1 guy with a crane rather than 8 guys by hand. Modern software, though, is leaning towards breaking things down into small chunks that can be dealt with in parallel, so octacore CPUs are going to help and Qualcomm's living in the 90s.

  6. Re:and 640K is all you will ever need. by jkonrath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is if your software can only address 640K. You don't add 8 gigs of RAM to your 8088 PC.

  7. Re:I'll say it by sjames · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Qualcom produces SOCs for cellphones. perhaps one day we will want to do image processing on a cell phone, but I don't think that today is the day.