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Qualcomm Says Eight-Core Processors Are Dumb

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.'"

376 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.

    --
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    E pluribus sanguinem
    1. Re:The Onion said it best by Golddess · · Score: 5, Funny

      Reminds me of a TV commercial from a while back, put out by one razor blade company, to make fun of another razor blade company for continually adding additional blades. I seem to recall that not long after those ads started airing, they disappeared, and the first company began adding additional blades as well.

      --
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    2. Re:The Onion said it best by kromozone · · Score: 2
    3. 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.

    4. Re:The Onion said it best by jonfr · · Score: 1, Informative

      The Onion is behind a paywall. It is like a censorship wall, but you have to pay for it too see the useless junk behind it. For that reason, The Onion can jump off a next digital cliff they find for all I care.

    5. 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.
    6. 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.

    7. Re:The Onion said it best by hjf · · Score: 1

      Quintippio!

    8. 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
    9. Re:The Onion said it best by Ichijo · · Score: 1

      It's like the Seven Minute Abs scene in There's Something About Mary (transcript).

      These are all humorous examples of violating the Zero-One-Infinity rule.

      --
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    10. Re:The Onion said it best by lxs · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not from where I'm posting. In fact...

      Please donate 0.005BTC to 1CqdRjs4fXT9R85WmwZUxJNLXQkQPa4knP to read the rest of this comment.

    11. Re:The Onion said it best by Kaenneth · · Score: 1

      I remember reading that the Commodore 1541 disk drive has the same CPU (6502?) and ram 64k as the main machine, and knowing that you could hook multiple up, waiting to do parallel processing when I was 10.

    12. Re:The Onion said it best by operagost · · Score: 3, Informative

      You don't buy new blades for your electric razor? I buy new ones about every 18 months. Trust me, after 2 years you would notice the difference.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    13. Re:The Onion said it best by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 1

      Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.

      --

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    14. Re:The Onion said it best by pedrop357 · · Score: 1

      I've found the Gillette Fusion (5 blade) works much better than the Gillette Mach 3.

    15. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You could be a man and grow a beard.

    16. Re:The Onion said it best by ultrasawblade · · Score: 1, Troll

      Yeah, with that super slow CPU driven bit-banged 3-wire bus connecting them and the 4K of RAM in the 1541 you could parallelize like it was 1899.

    17. Re:The Onion said it best by jonfr · · Score: 2, Informative

      You are allowed 5 free articles (or views) of The Onion website. After that they greet you with a paywall. One day, you are going to hit that limit. Your face is going to be annoyed once that happens.

    18. Re:The Onion said it best by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2

      Ironically, all this computing horsepower allowed them to insert enough layers of bloated software protocols to hobble the floppy I/O throughput to only 10% of what the drive was actually capable of. I had to pay good money for a 3rd party ROM module that cut through all that crap to deliver a massive speedup.

      It was a classic case of wasteful overdesign.

    19. Re:The Onion said it best by mercnet · · Score: 2

      Agreed! I gave up on my electric and tried out a double edge safety razor and bought 120 razor blades for $19. I can never go back to an electric or a Mach 10000 Pro with 8 blades razor.

    20. Re:The Onion said it best by Obfuscant · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem is that workloads people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores.

      The problem is people who don't do much on their computers who then claim that more computing power isn't necessary because nobody does much on their computers.

      I work in an environment where modelers are using quad-chip hex-core systems and could easily use more in a heartbeat. Load averages of greater than 100 on a regular basis. Small input, medium output, and lotsa lotsa CPU time.

      Where did you get the idea that everyone is expected to buy an 8 core system and so 8 core systems aren't justified because some people don't need them?

    21. Re:The Onion said it best by jkflying · · Score: 1

      Non-electric razors give me a rash. YMMV.

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      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    22. Re:The Onion said it best by jkflying · · Score: 2

      Clear your cookies?

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      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    23. Re:The Onion said it best by Larryish · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I use cheap disposable single-bladed razors.

      Use once, throw away.

      $1 for 10 of them.

    24. Re:The Onion said it best by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Personally, I've settled on this razor by Schick (4 for $6 at Walmart). They are quite cheap (cheaper than Mach 3) and I find they last quite a while. I have a pretty thick beard, and I can usually use them for a month or two, depending on the season. I've heard people rave about double edge safety razors, and I seriously considered going that route when I was overpaying for Gillette. Now I'm not so keen on switching, although I may decide to go that route in the future.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    25. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Your mom gave me a rash...

    26. Re:The Onion said it best by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      Please.IBM's System/360 Model 20 (yes, the entry level model that was barely compatible with a the rest of a mainframe family marketed around the concept of inter compatibility) was sold with as little as 4096 bits of core memory. That was in 1964, not 1899.

    27. Re:The Onion said it best by CanHasDIY · · Score: 3, Funny

      Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.

      Man, what's it say about me when I shave less often than a guy who goes by the handle "Beardo the Bearded?"

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    28. Re:The Onion said it best by mcmonkey · · Score: 5, Funny

      You are allowed 5 free articles (or views) of The Onion website. After that they greet you with a paywall. One day, you are going to hit that limit. Your face is going to be annoyed once that happens.

      That's perfect. The Onion only has 5 ideas that they keep recycling/repackaging.

    29. Re:The Onion said it best by houghi · · Score: 1

      Previous art exists: Mad magazine from 1979
      Am I really that old that I remember seeing the original

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    30. Re:The Onion said it best by Scragglykat · · Score: 1

      I saw a video on how to properly use a safety razor... does it really take 30 minutes to an hour to shave your face (and head for me) with one? There seemed to be several steps, and then you had to repeat till all hair was gone, etc... I whiz through a full head shave in about 10 minutes now with my 5-blade...

    31. Re:The Onion said it best by Minwee · · Score: 1

      Thanks jackass... now I just lost 35 minutes reading shit on the Onion before I got back to this stupid article.

      Could be worse. Someone could have sent you to the appropriate tvtropes page.

      The consequences of that would have been unthinkable.

    32. Re:The Onion said it best by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      A handheld vertical video recording of an analog television showing a VHS copy of the full frame version of the movie? You're doing it wrong.

      It is supposed to be redubbed in Spanish, with onscreen Turkish subtitles.

    33. Re:The Onion said it best by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      Clear your cookies?

      That plus changing user agent is how I get past the view limitation on Gannett-owned sites.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    34. Re:The Onion said it best by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      "...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it."

      No, it isn't better at all. But people still buy it.

      I don't know how you justify putting "better" in there, but in my experience they work LESS well than the old 2-blade razors. The 3-blade models should have been a fad, but the marketing folks have managed to put it over on everybody.

      It's just a way to make them more expensive, and maximize profits. If, in my opinion, I thought they were "better", I would buy them. But there are still plenty of older-style 2-blade razors to be found.

      "Women's" razors were already marketed-up until they were a joke... going to 5 blades made the joke not even funny anymore.

    35. Re:The Onion said it best by Dogtanian · · Score: 1

      I remember reading that the Commodore 1541 disk drive has the same CPU (6502?) and ram 64k as the main machine

      Apparently it does have a 6502 (the C64 has a 6510, which is a slightly enhanced 6502) but it only has 2KB of RAM.

      That sounds more sensible- I'd have been gobsmacked if they *had* put 64K in there as well. 64K might be peanuts nowdays, but it was a *lot* of memory (and still not cheap) when the C64 launched, and would probably have been overkill for a disk drive.

      The Atari 810 and 850 (disk drives for the Atari 8-bit computers) use the 6507 CPU, which is internally identical to the 6502, but with fewer external address lines. Ironically, even though that's a lower spec on paper (though I don't know the clock speed(s)), the performance of the drives was better because the C64 / 1541 was hobbled by a flawed interface design.

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    36. Re:The Onion said it best by vuke69 · · Score: 1

      No, it takes like two minutes for me if I'm being extra careful. I have a goatee which admittedly cuts down on the area a bit, but not THAT much. I also use feather blades, which are the sharpest you can get.

      I can do my head in about 10 minutes if I hit it with the clippers first.

      --
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    37. Re:The Onion said it best by fluffy99 · · Score: 2

      The problem is that workloads people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores.

      The problem is people who don't do much on their computers who then claim that more computing power isn't necessary because nobody does much on their computers.

      I work in an environment where modelers are using quad-chip hex-core systems and could easily use more in a heartbeat. Load averages of greater than 100 on a regular basis. Small input, medium output, and lotsa lotsa CPU time.

      Where did you get the idea that everyone is expected to buy an 8 core system and so 8 core systems aren't justified because some people don't need them?

      Okay, so you'd pointed out that there is a high-end workstation market that benefits from multiple cores. How does this translate into needing them in a phone where multiple threads or parallel processing are not the normal? The other consideration is that multiple cores can be less efficient that fewer cores that total the same flops rating. In that respect Qualcom is absolutely right that battery life is a very important consideration.

    38. Re:The Onion said it best by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Doesn't work that way for me. You must be one of those minorities The Onion likes to make fun of.

    39. Re:The Onion said it best by jittles · · Score: 1

      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.

      My beard is thick and heavy and my skin is sensitive. I shave every 3 or 4 days. My electric razor actually does a good job on 80% of my hair. But there is no way I could leave it the way it looks after I finish with the electric. I work from home most of the time, so I'll run the electric razor in between builds, or during other downtime. Once I get down to that last 20% I just use a regular razor. It takes a lot longer to shave versus a manual razor, but I do it during downtime, so I don't really care. Its also a lot easier and more comfortable than just using a regular razor when it starts getting long.

    40. Re:The Onion said it best by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

      I never knew there was a paywall because of this. Cookies disallowed by default, user agent randomized.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    41. Re:The Onion said it best by datavirtue · · Score: 2, Funny

      goatee.....the new mustache.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    42. Re:The Onion said it best by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      I've been using Astra blades and loving them, but I'm going to try Feather next time. I've heard great things about them. I got a pack of Wilkinsons free with my handle (standard Merkur 33) but wasn't too impressed.

      --
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    43. Re:The Onion said it best by Idbar · · Score: 1

      Not trying to stir the topic, but my two blades tend to have more hair stuck inside and be harder to clean. A 3 blade I used lasted longer because the hair didn't get stuck inside and the little getting in, would just get out by putting the blade under running water.

      So my point being, two or three may be good, but also the placement and the whole set does make a difference.

      On the other hand, Qualcomm is probably saying 8-cores is stupid, because they don't have one on the market. Wait to hear what they say when they come up with one.

    44. Re:The Onion said it best by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      Electric razor batteries give out and aren't user replaceable.

      You're not a geek are you. Open it up and replace the rechargeable batteries. Jameco has you covered.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    45. Re:The Onion said it best by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      Yeah, this asshole obviously doesn't run three virtual machines with the desire to run more. I get CPUs with as many cores as I can get.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    46. Re:The Onion said it best by ultrasawblade · · Score: 1

      Lol, you still had a parallel bus though, or channelized I/O or whatever you big iron types call it, not some CPU-driven molasses-based interface, right?

    47. Re:The Onion said it best by chill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Grow a set and use a straight razor like God intended. Nothing focuses your mind in the morning like the possibility of accidental suicide.

      If you REALLY want to wake up, use one in the shower. You'll be VERY careful about dropping it.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    48. Re:The Onion said it best by UnknowingFool · · Score: 1

      Well I'm sure that Qualcomm was referring to 8-core mobile CPUs where power consumption is a crucial factor. As mobile SOCs are a large bulk of Qualcomm's business. At this point there is very little usage of 4 core much less eight.

      --
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    49. Re:The Onion said it best by VortexCortex · · Score: 2
    50. Re:The Onion said it best by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure. I'd have to read the manual

    51. Re:The Onion said it best by matfud · · Score: 1

      They have higher end models that cost $100000 I don't think that is really saving a lot of money

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

      Well it *is* a parody of the news.

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    53. Re:The Onion said it best by interkin3tic · · Score: 1

      The fact that no one appears to have made a ceramic blade, including luxury straight razor blades which sell for hundreds of dollars, to me indicates that there are some other factors going into that as well.

    54. Re:The Onion said it best by HermMunster · · Score: 1

      We know not to hobble ourselves out of shortsightedness.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    55. Re:The Onion said it best by Urza9814 · · Score: 1

      That is not the market they're talking about. You're aware Qualcomm mostly makes chips for phones and such, right?

    56. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      A ceramic blade would never work. Ceramic is too brittle at the thickness necessary to shave your hair off. They'd chip in no time and start nicking you.

      FWIW, I've been using straight razors for about 15 years now. So I'm happy with a single blade. But I buy disposable blades (http://www.classicshaving.com/Feather_Razors.html) because I'm lazy. I never had the patient to strop my razor before every shave. In fact, I use a straight razor exactly because I'm lazy. A good straight razor shave lasts me more than twice as long as a safety razor shave, in terms of when the stubble starts making me look unkempt.

      The problem with those disposable straight razor blades, though, is that they're _too_ sharp. When you pop a new one in you have to be careful with razor burn. It's only after 2 or 3 shaves that they become comfortable.

      And no, you don't cut yourself more often with a straight razor. There's nothing like drawing a razor across your neck or face to keep your attention sharp. Fear the blade and you won't cut yourself. It's only when you stop fearing it that you lose focus and slice an ear lobe off. But fortunately it doesn't hurt much because it's so sharp.

    57. Re:The Onion said it best by Zynder · · Score: 1

      I had a beard before beards were cool. They're too mainstream now.

    58. Re:The Onion said it best by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      The cheap ones are shit, even if you only use them once. You can get the job done but with nowhere near as much comfort. I'm afraid if you insist on taking a razor blade to your face every day it's gonna cost you. Not as much as they charge for six blade heads that last a week, but not $0.10/day either.

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    59. Re:The Onion said it best by HermMunster · · Score: 1

      Nope, there's more than the high end workstation. To take such a stance, that there is the low end and the high end, it will yield a destruction of the middle which is where MOST of the processing is done.

      We fought pretty hard over the past 30 years to get computers accepted. We do not need to have those without proper insight making decisions that will kill that which we worked so hard to bring to life. Cell phones are not the end of the food chain.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    60. Re: The Onion said it best by CadentOrange · · Score: 2

      Who's to say it's a guy?

    61. Re:The Onion said it best by HermMunster · · Score: 1

      They need to redesign to make better batteries, faster charging batteries, swappable batteries, and batteries that are bigger, even if it means a heavier handset. It is their failure that will keep us from progressing. We aren't complaining about them saying what they say. We are complaining about them not trying to solve the bigger problem and then falling back on a harrumph, we can't do it!!

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

      On the other hand, Qualcomm is probably saying 8-cores is stupid, because they don't have one on the market. Wait to hear what they say when they come up with one.

      No, they're saying they're stupid because they really are stupid. There is little demand for more than 2 cores in today's (or tomorrow's) mobile software. 2 cores is the sweet spot, 4 is questionable, 8 is brazenly pandering to people who have no clue.

      The other thing is that the Samsung chip isn't even a genuine 8-core device. To be sure, there are a total of eight physical ARM cores present, but by design you're only intended to use four at a time. There are two clusters of four cores. One is a Cortex-A15 cluster (fast, high power, occupies lots of die area), the other is Cortex-A7 (slow, low power, small). This is a concept that ARM Holdings markets as "big.LITTLE". They don't have any core designs with a sufficiently wide dynamic range of power/performance operating points, so they're compensating by telling customers (like Samsung) that they should design in a redundant set of cores of a different design which can reach the desired power consumption targets. Firmware running below the OS decides which cluster should be active at any given time, and manages handoffs and powerdown of the inactive cluster. It's a very inelegant kludge, especially since the handoffs cause performance hits.

      Qualcomm and Apple both have high performance homegrown ARM core designs which scale down to lower power states better than A15, though they're not quite as fast as A15 on the top end. Hence, both of them are offering dual-core parts, since as long as your individual cores are fast two, is pretty much enough for the vast majority of mobile software. Apple is particularly focused on maximizing performance to power ratio, since they focus exclusively on building small (no 5" screens), thin, and light phones, yet they still want to be close to the top in real world performance and also among the best in battery life.

      Both of them could be shipping 4+ cores right now if they thought it was worth it. Once you've gone to two cores, adding more is fairly simple, since all the mechanisms for maintaining cache coherency between multiple cores have already been worked out. But they don't think it's worth it so they haven't done it.

      Samsung, on the other hand, needs something to hang their hat on. Unlike Qualcomm they can't integrate radios into their SoCs (yet, but they're working on it), which is a huge disadvantage. And they don't (yet, but they're working on it) have their own custom ARM core design. So they're trying to differentiate their current products using the hand they've been dealt, which presently means using ARM's big.LITTLE concept to offer absurd core counts that aren't actually useful to end users, and a bunch of other questionable things.

    63. Re: The Onion said it best by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      Who's to say it's a guy?

      ... now I'm frightened...

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    64. Re:The Onion said it best by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.

      Wash your face with soap. Or use aftershave. Or use a different aftershave.

    65. Re:The Onion said it best by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Oh yeah wash with the soap *after* you shave with the electric not before.

      I noticed this back when I still used a regular razor. Most people use shaving cream and that acts more or less like soap. A lot of the people who use electrics don't wash their face properly after shaving because they don't need to.

    66. Re:The Onion said it best by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      What Qualcomm is saying is this:

      We don't have an octa core and we really wish you stopped talking about octa cores because we really want you to buy our processors. Pretty please? With sugar on top?

    67. Re:The Onion said it best by Achra · · Score: 1

      Double edged safety razors really are the only way to go. The blades cost nearly nothing.. I think I pay $2.00 for a 10-pack from the store. The razor itself walks right through any length of beard hair... none of that trying to tap the hair out from between the twin/quad/octuple blades. Once I tried it, I honestly couldn't fathom why everyone switched to disposable multi-bladed razors in the first place. The interesting thing is that my wife&daughters all borrow my "scary old-timey razor" for doing their legs. They agree that it works better than any other razor they've found. I'm just saying, give it a shot. You can find an old gilette DE razor on ebay for a few dollars or buy one of the new overpriced merkur models (but I wouldn't bother).

      --
      Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
    68. Re:The Onion said it best by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      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).

      Does Qualcom make i7 chips?

      The other consideration is

      another consideration. I was replying specifically to the comment that "the workloads that people regularly do simply don't use 8 cores." If you're worried that your 8 core 2GHz CPU isn't doing things as fast as a 4 core 4GHz CPU, that's a different consideration, and hardly makes the 8 core system "dumb", if you realize that doing 8 different things at the same time is useful. And that those 8 cores are probably not going to be 2GHz, they'll be faster, since people wanting 8 cores will be looking for processing speed, not just being able to say "woot woot I have 8 cores you luzer lol!"

    69. Re:The Onion said it best by eyenot · · Score: 2

      I spend $25 every three months on four 5-blade razor heads with a lubricating strip. If I spent the same money on disposable, single-blade razors that are a bag of 10 for $1, then I would have 250 single-blade razors every three months.

      But in that three months' time, I would not get once single shave anywhere near as smooth and nick-free as I get with my 5-blade heads with the lubricating strip.

      And the disposable really isn't worth keeping around for a second or third shave. Yes, I've been there: I've done that. It's a noticeably worse shave each time you re-use a disposable one-use razor. You might disagree with me, there. You might be smug and tree-hugging yourself to death over that one, but read on.

      Instead of carrying around a slim, little blue box in my travel pack, I would be carrying around a big hefty bag of fucking two-hundred and fifty disposable razors. They don't "pack" that easily. If somebody wants to throw in a robotic arm that packs their shape for maximum quantum efficiency be my guest -- the razors will not take up the same tiny little space as the four individual 5-blade heads and will not be retrievable to their original dimensions.

      And, whether you use them for 1 use or scrounge and save and use them for 10 uses and then tie them into your beetle-inhabited dreadlocks once they've split their last hair, the fact of the matter is you will still, eventually, no matter how you cut it, have to dispose of all 250 disposable razors.

      And I, for the same amount of money, experienced much more joy with a much closer shave, heads that lasted much much longer, and threw away only four heads.

      Now let's make an analogy to the processors.

      Your suggestion is that for the cost of one quad-core computer, I might as well have spent my money on two hundred and fifty thermistors.

      Or something like that. I really can't pay attention to the processor side of the argument because I'm too smug about my choice of razor heads.

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
    70. Re:The Onion said it best by Andrio · · Score: 1

      This.

      I bought a pack of 100 safety razor blades for 11 bucks on Amazon. Cheap, and a better shave than my old 4-blade cartridge shaver.

      --
      The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
    71. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I use cheap disposable single-bladed razors.

      Use once, throw away.

      $1 for 10 of them.

      Nice, I am sure you recycle... right? o.O

    72. Re:The Onion said it best by Old+Wolf · · Score: 1

      You are allowed 5 free articles (or views) of The Onion website. After that they greet you with a paywall.

      Is that real? I saw it and figured it was another Onion joke.

    73. Re:The Onion said it best by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      I had a beard before beards were cool. They're too mainstream now.

      Yeah - same thing with penises.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    74. Re:The Onion said it best by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Same but I use them twice or thrice, or rather some non integer number I never keep track of.

    75. Re:The Onion said it best by pla · · Score: 1

      You are allowed 5 free articles (or views) of The Onion website.

      Per browser instance. You do scrub cookies between sessions, right?

      One day, I will hit that limit. On that day, I will copy the URL to the clipboard, restart Firefox, paste the URL back in, and resume browsing.

    76. Re:The Onion said it best by pla · · Score: 1

      I remember when 12 or 16mhz was fast. Who would need that speed?

      I remember those days too - And I remember so desperately needing more horsepower that we pushed the (then interrupt-driven) DRAM refresh rate to its limits just to get a few more useable cycles per second. I honestly wouldn't say I didn't care about speed until relatively modern times - Right around the 1.5GHz threshold.


      I remember when 32bit was unheard of, for that matter 16bit. No one would need that much power.

      No one (well, very very few) needed 32 bits of address space at the time, but 32 bit CPUs came with something far, far more valuable than merely more address space: Flat address space. No more screwing with segment registers, woo-hoo!

    77. Re:The Onion said it best by Newtonian_p · · Score: 1

      Enjoy getting a million little cuts.

      --

      There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't

    78. Re:The Onion said it best by Raenex · · Score: 1

      I spend $25 every three months on four 5-blade razor heads with a lubricating strip.

      The nice thing about using disposables is that I get a fresh blade with every shave (I don't reuse). You're reusing the same blade for weeks at a time, which means performance degrades as time goes by, and it's also unsanitary. God knows what's living on the blade, and then getting into your blood when you nick yourself.

      I'm partial to Bic Sensitive myself for good price/performance.

      Instead of carrying around a slim, little blue box in my travel pack, I would be carrying around a big hefty bag of fucking two-hundred and fifty disposable razors.

      Most people don't pack enough to last for 250 days! Are you traveling in the wilderness, that you can't stop by a store?

    79. Re:The Onion said it best by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Are you traveling in the wilderness, that you can't stop by a store?

      Perhaps. Even so, you'd want to look your best in case a particular important (or attractive) bear came along.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    80. Re:The Onion said it best by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      I have a Braun that takes three AAs. Since a rechargeable ran out on me halfway through at a bloody inconvenient time I've always bought ones that don't have captive batteries.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    81. Re:The Onion said it best by davester666 · · Score: 1

      Our products good. Competitors products bad. You buy our stuff now. That is all.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    82. Re:The Onion said it best by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 1

      PC games are increasingly going multicore. Took them long enough, but now they are getting there. That is a major "application" in terms of usage share. Probably more usage share than the image processing one of my fellow posters mentioned.

      --
      C - the footgun of programming languages
    83. Re:The Onion said it best by GNious · · Score: 1

      I grew a partial beard - less work overall

    84. Re:The Onion said it best by GNious · · Score: 1

      yeah, the individual strands of hairs on my head are 2-3x thicker than average, which may be why just using an electrical razor isn't an option.*

      Best solution I found is to use an electrical trimmer to get it down in size, then a proper blade to get from there to smooth. This way, I also just use the trimmer to get a "five-o-clock shadow" thingy on odd days (lazy), and leave it at that.
      Thankfully my beard grows very slowly, so I can skip days, or trim day 1 and shave day 2; this also turns out to be less stressful to the skin.

    85. 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.
    86. Re:The Onion said it best by Lincolnshire+Poacher · · Score: 1

      Nothing focuses your mind in the morning like the possibility of accidental suicide.

      Very amusing, but seriously: why are you shaving in the morning?

      You are more alert in the evening and your stubble will be softer from the sweat from the day's activitiy. Shave at night.

    87. Re:The Onion said it best by aurizon · · Score: 1

      most electric have a thin metal foil which prevents close shaves. They experimented with larger gaps, so the flesh bulged up, but this led to occasional flesh abrasion, so these never left the labs. For a smooth shave, I do an electric shave, followed by a double face wash followed by a safety razor shave. I only do this close work for dates, mostl times electric is OK

    88. Re: The Onion said it best by tfocker4 · · Score: 1

      Ahahaha. My God where are my mod points!?!

    89. Re:The Onion said it best by UnknowingFool · · Score: 1

      They need to redesign to make better batteries, faster charging batteries, swappable batteries, and batteries that are bigger, even if it means a heavier handset.

      You do realize that what you are asking for can be mutually exclusive. One of the main reasons batteries are not swappable is that manufacturers can use bigger ones for the inside of the phone. If you want to carry a heavier, bigger phone like a few years ago just to have 8 cores of which 2 may be used, go right ahead. The vast majority of consumers prefer lighter, smaller, and don't care about the number of cores or clock speed. They want phones that are fast enough. Adding more cores isn't the answer.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    90. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And the planet thanks you for your respect for our environment.

    91. Re:The Onion said it best by Larryish · · Score: 1

      I do not recycle anything.

      Instead, I remit my waste to the trash pickup company for long-term storage in a local landfill.

      It is a form of investment for the future, looking ahead to the day when we are all so fucking poor that we mine used razor blades and plastic butter bowls from beneath mounds of thinly-seeded red clay.

      Suck it, hippies!

    92. Re:The Onion said it best by toddestan · · Score: 1

      Most are designed so you'll pretty end up destroying the case while trying to prying it apart while attempting to get to the battery. They are also designed so that they always run off the battery while shaving, even if they are plugged into the wall (the power adapter only charges the battery while not in use) so the battery will still wear out and force you to buy a new one even if you never unplug it. And pretty much all of them they sell, even the cheapest of the cheap models, now have a battery. It's really a sham, worse than Apple when it comes to planned obsolesce.

    93. Re:The Onion said it best by BurningFeetMan · · Score: 1

      Surely you've seen this; The Gillete 3000!

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjEKt5Izwbo
      :)

    94. Re:The Onion said it best by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 1

      I've been shaving since 2004. Can't change my handle.

      I'm pretty sure I'm a dude.

      --

      ---
      ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
    95. Re:The Onion said it best by pepty · · Score: 1

      ...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it.

      It's marketed enough that people buy it. If you actually need to shave near your nose it's pretty much useless. Excepting straight razors I've tried just about everything manual and electric; I'm sticking with a DE razor and a couple of drops of shave oil.

    96. Re:The Onion said it best by Sardaukar86 · · Score: 1

      Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.

      So did mine, pissed me right off.

      I gave up and went back to carving gibs from my ugly mug with blade shavers until one of my friends suggested that it can take a couple of weeks for the skin to get used to electric shavers.

      I was skeptical - electric for me meant the gift of a million tiny skin infections so I wasn't exactly keen to revisit the experience. He said I needed to be patient (nothing new) and went to to suggest being *extremely* light and gentle for the first week or so, even if it meant an imperfect shave.

      Amazingly the advice worked and now I shave absent-mindedly with no special care while I ssh into my boxes and check my morning e-mail. One thing I would add is to invest in a nice aftershave; firstly, I think that as an astringent it may act to close the pores (or some such thing) which is supposed to be good. Secondly, the bolt of pure blue-shot-with-white agony is strangely worth it in its own right, kinda like being slapped awake by a beautiful goddess possessing the most common superpower and wielding a dripping wet mackerel.

      Yow!

      --
      ..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
    97. Re:The Onion said it best by Waccoon · · Score: 1

      Wet shaving is the only way to do it. Buy an electric that's properly waterproof and go nuts.

      My beard is so thick an stubborn, I am seriously considering laser hair removal so I don't have to gut my face every morning. However, my rotary shaver does a great job if I use some soap lather (shaving foam is too thick). If I try to shave dry, all I get is imitation sandpaper.

    98. Re:The Onion said it best by demonrob · · Score: 1

      then shave it off.

    99. Re: The Onion said it best by philip.paradis · · Score: 1

      Don't be afraid. You might like it. In the event you don't like it, as long as it was captured on film, someone else might still enjoy it.

      --
      Write failed: Broken pipe
    100. Re:The Onion said it best by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      "On the other hand, Qualcomm is probably saying 8-cores is stupid, because they don't have one on the market. Wait to hear what they say when they come up with one."

      I certainly wouldn't rule out an eventual 8-core from Qualcomm, at which point their assertion will silently disappear and nobody will ever admit on the record that it had ever been made; but I'd also be inclined to trust Qualcomm if we include the implicit '8 cores is stupid given current process and power constraints and mobile workloads'.

      Qualcomm, with their emphasis on tight radio integration into SoCs, makes ARM chips pretty much exclusively for severely power constrained (and not much less severely thermal constrained) devices, whose OSes tend to be pretty brutal about things like background processes, to save power, and whose most compute-intensive functions (mostly related to slinging video) tend to be fobbed off to dedicated hardware, also to save power. That's not really an environment where you'd expect good scaling as the number of CPUs increases. Nor is it an environment where you'd particularly expect your customers to pay more for extra cores that won't make their products much faster.

      For ARM Ltd. themselves, or for companies implementing their designs more or less verbatim, there is a stronger incentive to look into bigger chips: ARM wants some server marketshare (or at least some pressure on Intel's margins), and anybody buying cores that are slower per-thread almost certainly has a compute problem that can be parallelized. In that case, since on-die interconnects are easier and faster than board-level ones, there's a much stronger case to be made for cramming as many CPUs onto a die as your process will allow. Though, even here, ARM has been forced to make concessions(notably releasing the A12, a less-thirsty A15 variant, and offering the big.LITTLE scheme to compensate for the A15's power issues at low load). Plus, with verbatim implementation licenses being (comparatively) cheap, you've got an arms race between companies like Samsung and relative unknowns like Mediatek, who are cheap, cheap, cheap and willing to offer all sorts of (sometimes questionably useful; but marketable) configurations.

    101. Re:The Onion said it best by jabuzz · · Score: 1

      Perhaps because if he shaves at night by the morning he will need to shave again. You might be lucky and have slow growing facial hair. From personal experience my brother in law's facial hair takes about five days to grow to the same length as mine does in a day.

      The only time I shave in the evening is when I am on a skiing holiday...

    102. Re:The Onion said it best by jabuzz · · Score: 1

      Actually I think the trend is to larger and heavier over the last couple of years, which is kind of annoying. I don't want a phone with a five inch/12cm screen thank you very much.

    103. Re:The Onion said it best by shentino · · Score: 1

      My boss won't let me.

      Even though he has one himself, oddly enough.

  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 PhxBlue · · Score: 5, Funny

      And I suppose 640k is enough for anybody, too?

      --
      !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
    2. Re:qualcomm is right by swan5566 · · Score: 1

      Many high-end scientific computing applications will already take and use as many cores as you give it. Definitely a niche market though.

      --
      In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
    3. 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.)

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    4. Re:qualcomm is right by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      Nothing?

      So databases don't exist? Scientific applications don't exist?

      Lots and lots of ARM64 cores will be a big deal in the server room one day.

    5. Re:qualcomm is right by timeOday · · Score: 2

      Low utilization isn't a problem so long as the extra resources don't cost much to make and don't draw significant power unless they are needed. Parallel processing definitely has valid uses on a phone; the only question is whether additional general-purpose cores can beat out more special-purpose units that operate in parallel. The new Moto-X has a "natural language processor", a "contextual computing processor", and it goes without saying that it has a GPU of some sort. So what's better, a mainly-serial CPU and a big bag of co-processors, or several general-purpose cores? It remains to be seen. But the GPU itself has hundreds of more limited "cores", so there's no question the basic, purely sequential processing model is long gone and will not return.

    6. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:qualcomm is right by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Usually with multi-Core. you can expect to run 8 things at once at full speed. Writing code for parallel processors takes some fore though. Most of the time we just write stuff that follow normal top down. 8 Core Phones work if you have 8 Apps that need to run in real time.

      However the trend to more cores is due to the size of the chip getting smaller, but not the performance per chip.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    8. Re:qualcomm is right by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Sure it forces you to think.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    9. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      On a phone yes.

      On a server no. I am surprised ARMS have not been in the server room yet as power consumption is the biggest cost and where I/O in SQL latency is the bottleneck and not cpu performance.

      The more cores the more virtualization can be had and more threads and processes can be thrown on it.

    10. Re:qualcomm is right by TheLink · · Score: 2

      8 core general processing CPUs on a phone are dumb for now given the power consumption and battery limits.

      If you have 8 processes running 100% max, it's likely something is wrong somewhere - you either want to kill the processes (and save battery life) or you should be running the workload on a PC/laptop.

      Maybe in the future we would have wearable computers that continuously do video capture, video compression and image+audio recognition (includes 3D location and separation of audio items[1] and 3D visual mapping), navigation (GPS and via visual mapping), augmented reality stuff, run "iSavant" apps (be Rain Man without hopefully the autistic bits) and also allow you to do virtual telepathy (brain computer interfaces) and telekinesis (by interacting with location servers - that help people control stuff at a location).

      But till then, what 8 core apps make sense on phones?

      [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi4ACLfaWy0

      --
    11. 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.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    12. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Of course these applications are FPU based. Last I checked the latest ARM had the performance of a 1997 pentium pro in that area. They do not have lower power consumption for nothing. Phone users do not care about FPU so it is mute, but not in that usage case you have given.

    13. 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

    14. Re:qualcomm is right by aztracker1 · · Score: 1

      Especially on I/O bound applications... When I've read articles on some of the multi-core arm systems being worked on, my natural thought is they would pair well with an application platform that does async operations to database servers, and other backend systems.. fielding lots of users.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    15. Re:qualcomm is right by Bomarc · · Score: 2

      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

      Ever open Task Manager (in windows)? There are other things going on in every OS besides just the application you are running.
      Ever run more than one application?

      Short sided people - are not (still?) not using - or seeing, or bothering to code for multi-core systems.

    16. Re:qualcomm is right by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      well, that's if you're sticking it in a phone and not something else..

      btw a ferrari engine is pointless in a groceries getter car as well, horrible fuel economy and most drivers would never redline it anyways.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    17. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Of course these applications are FPU based. Last I checked the latest ARM had the performance of a 1997 pentium pro in that area. They do not have lower power consumption for nothing. Phone users do not care about FPU so it is mute, but not in that usage case you have given.

      I don't see what the FPU being unable to talk has to do with anything... And furthermore I disagree with your line of reasoning that we can conclude the FPU is mute from the (probably valid) premise that phone users don't care about it. Really though, all of this is a moot point if you just have trouble distinguishing between similar sounding words.

    18. Re:qualcomm is right by aztracker1 · · Score: 1

      There are a few companies offering ARM systems for the server room.. unfortunately cost/performance wise they're so much more than x86 it doesn't come close to offsetting the power savings compared to a 4socket AMD or Intel server.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    19. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Performance in servers are different. For app servers I would agree. For apache and Java servlets it is not how fast, but how wide your platform is. Meaning more slower cpus that equate to higher performance as these are heavily threaded and i/o bound more than FPU or integer bound.

      But I suppose with iscsi, raid, and fibre channel ethernet or FDDI the power savings go back out again.

    20. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm somewhat inclined to agree, actually! Samsung's S4 uses different cores running at different clock speeds for different tasks, and is obviously about improving power utilization. Given that, it really just looks like Qualcomm is trying to spin their business decision (to not do eight-core chips, probably because they don't think they can compete) to their investors as cost-saving for their customers. I didn't get the impression that power consumption was the bigger concern. But, hey, maybe that's their niche.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    21. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Don't scientific and mathematical apps use floats to store numbers with large amounts of decimals and to perform mathematical operations on them? FPU would be the bottleneck for such applications like Mathmatica or Autocad.

    22. Re:qualcomm is right by Reeznarch · · Score: 1

      I do a lot of music production as a hobby, and having more cores is definitely a good thing for that as well. Still a niche market.

    23. Re:qualcomm is right by sribe · · Score: 1

      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

      Uhhmmm. Image & video processing libraries? You know, the ones used by camera apps, and video chat apps.

      Uhhmmm. Rendering libraries? You know, the ones used by games.

      Uhhmmm. Speech recognition? Speech Synthesis?

    24. Re:qualcomm is right by HermMunster · · Score: 2

      Instead of slimming down a phone as you reduce component size add more battery. And find a way to better manage battery use. And, make use of those battery technologies we hear so much about on Reddit.com. Seriously I hear about so many battery technologies that would overcome their limitations it's sick thinking about them not being available NOW.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    25. Re:qualcomm is right by kimvette · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I would think that an eight core processor might make sense for a high end smartphone; you could have four cores with scalable clock speed for high performance computing (gaming, video editing, etc.) and switch to four low-power cores on the fly, which will still multitask very well but will conserve power. If only any smartphone manufacturer would introduce such a beast.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    26. Re:qualcomm is right by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not so sure about that. Parallel code tends to have plenty of overhead even after optimization, e.g. expecting approx. 2.5 times speed increase from single-core when running on 4 cores is more realistic than a 4 times increase. Data must be shuffled around, OS threads prepared, contexts are switched, etc.

    27. Re:qualcomm is right by a1cypher · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Parallelization does introduce it's own overhead. Some problems can be made to run parallel very easily without much effort. For example, lets say you have an unordered database of names and you want to count how many letter "A"s are in each name. You can very easily divide the database into eight equal parts and send it off to eight cores for processing and they will happily churn away until you have your answer with almost no additional overhead.

      However, different problems cant be as easily parallelized. For example, lets say you take the same database of names and you want to sort it alphabetically. You can send each chunk of the database off to be sorted on each core, but now you have 8 pieces of the database that are all sorted and need to be merged back into the original list. This extra work of merging and communicating becomes the overhead.

      This is a very simple example, but for many problems the speed gained by parallelization is reduced for every new thread. So you might get an almost 50% speedup by adding a second core, but the third core will give you maybe only 20% speedup, and the fourth 15%, etc...

      And as mentioned by others, parallelization is almost always done to improve performance, not efficiency. It would be more power efficient for the one core to do the job if you are measuring efficiency by something like cycles per watt. This doesnt make much sense in a mobile device whose paramount concern is to run a long time on a battery.

    28. Re:qualcomm is right by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      I want my phone to take calls and sms messages, and to wake me up with alarm. How many cores do I need for that? a fucking phone doesn't need 8 cores

    29. Re:qualcomm is right by a1cypher · · Score: 1

      I'd love to redline a ferrari to get the groceries, but where do I put the child seat?

    30. Re:qualcomm is right by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 1

      It depends. My scientific apps mostly use finite fields.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    31. Re:qualcomm is right by poetmatt · · Score: 1

      I don't know what operating system you use but almost all current operating systems (instead of software, which is a dumb argument), can use 8 cores. Nobody ever said it had to be for applications as you imply, you made that assumption yourself.

    32. Re:qualcomm is right by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      I imagine that at the time, 32MB would have been a retarded waste of RAM for most people-- which if I recall was sort of the context of that quote.

      Its stupid because today it is better in most cases to have 2-4 cores clocked higher than 8 cores that arent as fast.

    33. Re:qualcomm is right by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Every time I check the benchmarks, "x64" architectures (amd, intel) still absolutely murder ARM architectures on power-usage-per-task and raw cpu power. The only place ARM has an edge is lower absolute power draw.

    34. Re:qualcomm is right by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      So then pretend I said virtualization. I would love to run android in a VM on my device that is running a more GNU/Linux style OS.

    35. Re:qualcomm is right by ls671 · · Score: 3

      Many high-end scientific computing applications will already take and use as many cores as you give it. Definitely a niche market though.

      It took me a while to figure out that we were talking about the smart phones and tablets market here. 8 cores work fine for servers, especially if you run VMs on them.

      I guess people running scientific applications on their smart phones and tablets are as much a niche market than people running servers on them although I have seen it done.

      Heck, while at it, 8 cores is dumb for desktop too, for average users who just browse the Internet and send emails. Even for gamers, I am not sure how many games can take advantage of 8 cores. Anybody cares to comment about the gaming aspect?

      --
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    36. Re:qualcomm is right by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      My own software supports 8 cores. It actually supports 512 cores, and really will use them if your network and scheduler can keep track of it all.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    37. Re:qualcomm is right by ls671 · · Score: 1

      1) Not trolling here. Are you sure music production takes advantage of 8 cores? Can you please explain a bit?

      2) Also, do you do music production on your smart phone?:
      http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4046121&cid=44458907

      You can still answer question 1 if the answer to question 2 is no.

      Thanks in advance.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    38. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Why would you mute your FPU? What if it has something interesting to say? What if it's trying to compliment you? What if it's screaming for help?

      Oh wait, FPUs can't talk. I guess the point is moot.

    39. Re:qualcomm is right by operagost · · Score: 1

      640K was enough in 1981, so buying a PC with 640K (with the expectation that it would be fully depreciated in 5-7 years) was good then. Buying a 4-code phone with the expectation that it will be retired in 2-3 years (the usual) is reasonable. Today, how we use our phones, 8 cores are probably not needed.

      --

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    40. Re:qualcomm is right by jimbo · · Score: 1

      The thing is that even four active cores doesn't make sense for a phone. You might be able to utilize two cores well and for daily mundane usage a single core 'multitasks' perfectly well. This is why you see quad core processors with a single low power fallback core.

    41. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Sure it forces you to think.

      I think I need more than 640k of RAM.

    42. Re:qualcomm is right by Valdrax · · Score: 1

      And I suppose 640k is enough for anybody, too?

      That's cute, but writing code that makes good use of multiple execution units is significantly harder than one that just makes good use of more RAM. It doesn't matter how many processors you throw at a task if it can't be broken up.

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    43. Re:qualcomm is right by Valdrax · · Score: 1

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

      So, how is cell phone reception over there in that parallel universe where Tesla got us all switched over to wireless power transmission? Satisfy my curiosity -- does anyone get killed touching doorknobs after walking across a shag carpet?

      --
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    44. Re:qualcomm is right by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2

      Hotplugging overhead on most current ARM chips is murder, and also, many of the nicest power management features of ARM chips don't work well when more than one core is active (I think it's related somewhat to all of Linus' rants about braindead cache architectures). Interestingly, Qualcomm is the only SoC manufacturer that has any decent mitigation for this limitation (asynchronous clocking of each core, which mostly makes up for the fact that cpuidle goes to shit when more than one core is lit.)

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    45. Re:qualcomm is right by Bomarc · · Score: 1

      Short sided people - are not (still?) not using - or seeing, or bothering to code for multi-core systems.

      Well of course not. they're too busy attending physical therapy attempting to compensate for having one side of the body taller than the other. It's very short-sighted to expect them to be off coding instead.

      I hate it when I fat figure ... finger like that.

    46. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Great job at being arrogant while you never seem to have heard of voltage scaling (i.e. decreasing the clock by a factor 4 saves up to a factor 16 of power).
      Just for completeness, this is a dynamic vs. static power issue. If your static power dominates more transistors are an issue. If dynamic power dominates, clock frequency times toggling gates counts.
      Even if static power dominates, a more-core solution can be of advantage - when your 8 cores actually need fewer transistors than your fast single core. Which (in a less extreme version) is what A15 vs. A7 is about,

    47. Re:qualcomm is right by Spy+Handler · · Score: 1

      He said he's doing it as a HOBBY, so sure why not, do it on the phone.

      You could say I do video production as a hobby. Just last week I made some high quality video of my dog chasing a ball with an iphone 5!

    48. Re:qualcomm is right by Githaron · · Score: 2

      If the game industry ever moves from putting most of their effort in graphics, graphics, and more graphics, I see no reason why extra cores couldn't be used on improving AI and physics experiences.

    49. Re:qualcomm is right by Sqr(twg) · · Score: 1

      they are dumb because nothing supports 8 cores

      Exactly! Why manufacture something that nobody is using?

      This reminds me of this company that I know of, that has a beautiful working prototype for a flying car. It is awesome in every way, just like in Blade Runner. This prototype has been sitting around since the late nineties, but they decided not to take it into production. Why? Because nobody uses friggin' flyin cars.

      Anyways. I hope people start using flying cars soon, so that companies can start producing them.

    50. Re:qualcomm is right by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1

      Ever open Task Manager (in windows)?

      I usually keep a task manager and/or CPU chart running at all times on any OS.

      There are other things going on in every OS besides just the application you are running.

      Indeed, there are usually dozens of tasks. But at any given time, most all of them are *sleeping*. Even when corporate bloatware virus scanning daemons are active, they're mostly I/O bound.

      I don't remember ever seeing all 4 cores on my development workstation actually pegged simultaneously. Of course, I don't do things like transcode videos all day, but neither do most people.

    51. Re:qualcomm is right by ls671 · · Score: 1

      Sure, but question 2 was secondary. Technically, I am more interested in an answer to question 1.

      Thanks.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    52. Re:qualcomm is right by yakovlev · · Score: 1

      It's not quite that simple.

      All things being equal, if I could build 1 core with 2x the performance at 2x the active power usage, I would build that rather than building 2 cores at 1x performance and 1x power usage each. The single core would offer more system performance and as a result less power usage for the same workload.

      The problem is, we've gotten really good at making cores, and now building a machine with 2x performance will take more like (hypothetically) 4x active power usage. This is true across the industry, from servers all the way to mobile phones. Two cores with 1x performance each is 2x system power for 1.9x system performance in some workloads and only 1x system performance in others.

      The problem is, the more cores you have, the less likely you are to get additional performance from them. Right now, 4 cores is about the most that PC games are able to utilize, and I would suspect that for phones the same is true. 8 high-performance cores really is overkill for a phone. 4 high-performance and 4 low-performance cores (bit.LITTLE) is a completely different thing, and can make sense because you can get the high-performance cores into even lower power modes.

      In the short-term, I actually think the QUALCOMM guy is generally right. 8 high-performance cores just doesn't make sense right now, as hardly any software that runs on a phone will be able to make use of that many cores. The high-end phone market turns out new products so fast that we need to be closer to having software support for 8 cores before we start wasting limited resources by adding cores that software won't be able to use. I'm fairly confident that there are better uses for that die area than for additional cores.

    53. Re:qualcomm is right by phorm · · Score: 1

      Not quite so much on desktops do, although per-core utilization is improving somewhat.

      On non-desktops... how about VM hosts?

    54. Re:qualcomm is right by timmyf2371 · · Score: 1

      I agree and I think that there will still be a market for basic low-powered phones for a long time to come.

      However, what the multi-core CPU may turn out to be useful for is the smartphone - where the telephone, SMS and alarm features are simply three apps amongst many. Smartphones are becoming ever more popular and are being used in situations which previously would have required a laptop - for example, photo editing.

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    55. Re:qualcomm is right by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't it depends on how many significant digits are actually required?

      I understand "math" for the sake of math is different than say math for engineering. There is a point in keeping extra decimal places where it no longer matters in many (not all) applications.

      --
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    56. Re:qualcomm is right by kimvette · · Score: 1

      You have no idea how multitasking works. Besides, many apps can take advantage of as many cores as you can throw at it.

      Even if an app is written to spawn only two threads, other cores keep busy - filesystem maintenance, listening for phone calls, reading user input, listening for your bluetooth devices, and a slew of other tasks. That your game only takes advantage of two or four cores doesn't mean the other cores would go to waste.

      --
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    57. Re:qualcomm is right by DamonHD · · Score: 1

      My pet app will use any number of cores (it configures itself at runtime) and is running right now on hardware from ARM v5 (single core) though multi-core x64 to 24-thread Niagara CoolThreads.

      What counts for my app is latency in responses to user requests, and energy cost per unit of user-perceived work done; multi-core and single-core have pros and cons depending on the user request and history. (One part of the system runs off-grid on battery power, just like a smartphone, on the single-core ARM, but would happily use 8-core if available and efficient.)

      Rgds

      Damon

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
    58. Re:qualcomm is right by GoogleShill · · Score: 1

      No, YOUR fucking phone doesn't need 8 cores. Plenty of us use our phones for more than that and can utilize more cores.

    59. Re:qualcomm is right by Thalagyrt · · Score: 1

      Virtual instruments and effects run at the very least in their own thread within the host process, and some run as their own process and use a form of IPC to communicate with the host. Sure, the single virtual instrument won't parallelize, but a typical project has dozens of effects/instruments, and a bunch of threads that pretty much just read data from one buffer and write data to another buffer without any inter-dependencies is pretty trivial for the kernel to schedule across as many cores as available.

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    60. Re:qualcomm is right by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

      Processor performance is complicated. It is dumb, today, in his applications, with his memory, storage and network bandwidth.

      No single app needs to use 8 cores, the OS should be worrying about that for reasonable cell phone apps. It's just a matter of back for hte buck, if you have a single 32bit wide memory bus running at 1GHz, with a low bandwidth modem, are you really going to be able to keep 8 cores busy with reasonable cache sizes? No, so it's dumb.

      In 10 years is it dumb? Probably not. Is it dumb on an enterprise server with 3 channels of DDR running at 1800MTS, and >40Gbps of I/O? Not slightly.

    61. Re:qualcomm is right by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 1

      The actual simplest solution is the one on tablets. Make battteries user replaceable. I have no problem carrying two tablets instead of one. So I also do not have a problem carrying a tablet and a spare battery.

      Of course there goes your obsolescence.

    62. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      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.

      Then you would think wrong. Efficiency is a tricky measure. It would be efficient for an equal task, but any task that is written to take full advantage of 8 cores is quite likely to be a completely frivolous waste of compute power. As such, how many people are going to be willing to use an app that burns through your entire battery in 20 minutes just because it has nice eye candy. If it is something more worthwhile, then they are almost guaranteed to use a more permanently installed computer (one with permanent power supply) to do the task. It is simply a case of a solution to a problem that does not exist (yet?). Maybe in 10 years there may be a problem for which 20 minute battery life is an acceptable tradeoff, but I doubt it.

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    63. Re:qualcomm is right by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 1

      So run four applications that use two cores. I have three or four applications running on my tab at the same time.
      So yes the cores are useful.

    64. Re:qualcomm is right by fluffy99 · · Score: 1

      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.)

      Qualcom basically called them out for building an 8-core as a marketing ploy ("mine goes to eleven!"). Consumers have been focusing on the number of cores without understanding that more cores doesn't translate to better (e.g. all the Chinese crap tablets with slow dual-cores). Right or wrong about the benefit of an 8-core SOC, this is a marketing war and Qualcom just fired a viciously public volley.

    65. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      Battery life? My eight cores run off of atomic power and masses of water flowing through the Niagra power facility.

      Qualcomm isn't making desktop or server CPUs, they make low power mobile CPUs. It is nearly by definition that all of their products are battery driven.

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    66. Re:qualcomm is right by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      Sure, but question 2 was secondary. Technically, I am more interested in an answer to question 1.

      http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=multi+core+music+production

      Have fun.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    67. Re:qualcomm is right by Bomarc · · Score: 1

      As an FYI: on my primary system (a 2 CPU / 2 core - 4 total) frequently see about 50% CPU usage and about 2-4 times a day see at/near 100%.

      As for IO bound (similar problem here) - I'm hoping to migrate to SSD (Raid 1; I could digress by asking why people tolerate the number of SSD failures, but that would be OT) and help reduce IO limitations.

    68. Re:qualcomm is right by jkflying · · Score: 1

      Lots of cores is great if your workload is parallelisable, but if that's the case you're generally better off using a bunch of smaller cores like in CUDA or OpenCL. Games don't generally use more than a few cores because they throw the stuff they can at the GPU instead.

      It's a fairly narrow set of tasks that need both high-level cores AND can be parallelised.

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    69. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      I would think that an eight core processor might make sense for a high end smartphone; you could have four cores with scalable clock speed for high performance computing (gaming, video editing, etc.) and switch to four low-power cores on the fly, which will still multitask very well but will conserve power. If only any smartphone manufacturer would introduce such a beast.

      Cost is a far more important factor in smartphones (even the high end) than performance. Paying for 8 cores when you only use 4 is just plain idiotic. You could just get a more power efficient 4 core setup and have done with it. Most of the 4 core systems can quite happily scale power levels up and down with utilization, so using 8 cores to achieve 4 cores with adjustable power consumption is, as stated, idiotic.

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    70. Re:qualcomm is right by jkflying · · Score: 1

      Uhhhm GPU? Those are all tasks that aren't suitable for an ARM core to be doing.

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    71. Re:qualcomm is right by Ottibus · · Score: 1

      Of course these applications are FPU based. Last I checked the latest ARM had the performance of a 1997 pentium pro in that area.

      You need to check again. ARM cores have up to 50X the floating point performance of a Pentium Pro.

    72. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      Ever open Task Manager (in windows)? There are other things going on in every OS besides just the application you are running. Ever run more than one application? Short sided people - are not (still?) not using - or seeing, or bothering to code for multi-core systems.

      There are only so many things that need processing in the background. The leap from 1 processor to 2 had huge advantages in that regard: The background tasks no longer truly used resources that the active tasks needed. Even some applications could be paralleled for a significant performance enhancement on their own. Even going from 2 cores to 4 offers some advantage, even in the mobile sector, where some of the eye candy apps need some horsepower behind them, but graphics are your biggest resource hogs when it comes to CPU, and the mobile devices just don't have the pixel count to make any reasonable demand for that much compute power. As mentioned above, additional parallel compute power comes at a significant efficiency cost, and as such is not usually a good idea unless raw compute power is significantly more important that power consumption. This whole thread boils down to Qualcomm understanding their market segment very very well, and you not so much.

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    73. Re:qualcomm is right by sjames · · Score: 1

      That's something I don't understand. Current tech would easily allow for a phone double the thickness of the current models to have tremendous battery life and still weigh less that the old school desk phone handset. That would also make them more durable to the point where breaking the phone by dropping it would be genuinely surprising. Why not do that? If they make the damned things any thinner people are going to start cutting themselves it seems.

    74. Re:qualcomm is right by sjames · · Score: 1

      On a cellphone? No, they don't.

      Perhaps there will be a call for it in the server room one day, but today isn't that day.

    75. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      Uhhmmm. Rendering libraries? You know, the ones used by games.

      I'm pretty sure no one is playing the latest call of duty on their cell phone, nor would they do so even if they could. In the unlikely event that I am wrong about both of the above, the cell phones just don't have the raw pixel count to require so much raw compute power.

      Uhhmmm. Speech recognition? Speech Synthesis?

      I seem to remember half way decent speech recognition back in '99, so I doubt that recognition requires that much compute power. Syntheis seems like pretty much the same deal. Just simply not enough value need to be calculated in any given second to require the phenominal compute power that 4 cores provide, much less 8.

      You might make an argument for video compression / processing, but the abundance of bandwidth is making this less and less important. The abundance of storage is removing much of the need for good image compression for cameras as well. Although the images are huge (13 Mpixel! or better), there is so much storage available that the phone can store the images uncompressed and compress them at leisure, and it would take a backlog of hundreds of images before the phone would be in danger of running out of storage.

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    76. Re:qualcomm is right by Misagon · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but multicore does not scale that well.
      As soon as one core needs data that is not in the cache, it stalls. A stalled core is a core that does not run.
      The best utilization of multicore is if you are using all cores on the same problem, and the same data. Making your code scale to multiple cores can be quite tricky. I found that [url=http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/4-329]this talk at Microsoft Build 2013[/url] explains quite well what you need to do.

      --
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    77. Re:qualcomm is right by user317 · · Score: 1

      > it really just looks like Qualcomm is trying to spin their business decision (to not do eight-core chips, probably because they don't think they can compete) to their investors as cost-saving for their customers.

      its more they other way. They are calling out MediaTeks 8 core hype. the 8 core chip is 4 A15 and 4 A7 cores, and you can run only 2 of the A15 at the same time (may be able to burst all 4 for a second) or the chip will overheat, and a7 is basically the chip you had in your feature phone 5 years ago. Qualcomm's chips run each core at variable voltage, so all of the cores can be on at any time at different voltages.

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    78. Re:qualcomm is right by Bomarc · · Score: 1

      My initial response -- then why doesn't Qualcomm say "users of our software don't need" rather than "8 cores.."?

      Given that mobile devices contain many software ... issues (see earlier /. article "How Did My Stratosphere Ever Get Shipped?"); I am not surprised that people such as you don't see the need more than two cores.

      As for "significant power cost", this has long been since resolved by "good" CPU design; and shutting down areas of the CPU that are not in use. Don't need eight CPU's right now? The OS 'can' shut down 2 (or 4).

    79. Re:qualcomm is right by InvalidError · · Score: 1

      There is one really funny thing about multi-processor loads: most consumer-grade high-compute loads are DSP and GPGPUs are usually very good at DSP stuff so it would likely be (much) more efficient to do your image and sound processing on the GPGPU than extra cores anyway.

      So if your software requires 8 cores, there is a high probability it isn't using the right compute resource.

    80. Re:qualcomm is right by drcheap · · Score: 1

      I imagine that at the time, 32MB would have been a retarded waste of RAM for most people--

      ObM$Bashing: Have you see what windows does with RAM these days? There are several 32MB chunks of "restarted waste of RAM" scattered about the address space.

    81. Re:qualcomm is right by loufoque · · Score: 1

      Some applications of scientific computing can be worth doing on a tablet, in particular those tied to visualization.

    82. Re:qualcomm is right by InvalidError · · Score: 1

      That's exactly what I was thinking too.

      Most of the massively parallel stuff most people might use on a smartphone or tablet would be more efficiently handled by the GPGPU than the CPU in the first place.
      Four cores for general processing and a beefier IGP to handle the LCD, 3D rendering and GPGPU seem like the more logical way to go for optimal battery life to me.

    83. Re:qualcomm is right by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      Whoosh.

    84. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      Perhaps the fact that you code in Haskell also explains why you think your mail client does so much it needs its own core.

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    85. Re:qualcomm is right by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 1

      Nobody ever claimed 640k was enough for everybody by the way. It's actually an urban myth that Bill Gates said it - he never did, if anything he was pushing for the opposite during that time period.

      http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_

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    86. Re:qualcomm is right by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      My app doesn't need a lot of cpu power or even memory bandwidth so it seemed to scale pretty well to lots of cores. but there was a pretty nice drop in latency as I benchmarked it on 2 to 8 to 24 core/thread systems (my SunFire T2000 found cheaply on ebay). I set 512 as the top as my OS setup instructions didn't work with more (address space and max file descriptor constraints), it's up to the user of my program to configure it for best perf in their use case (just a handful of parameters in a .ini). Luckily I don't have energy cost concerns on this personal project, since I do that professional for a living and I don't particularly enjoy doing power work.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    87. Re:qualcomm is right by geoskd · · Score: 1

      As for "significant power cost", this has long been since resolved by "good" CPU design; and shutting down areas of the CPU that are not in use. Don't need eight CPU's right now? The OS 'can' shut down 2 (or 4).

      Its not the power cost of the extra cores that is the single biggest reason not to have them, it is the actual increase in cost of the processor. Increasing die size reduces yield in non linear ways. Doubling the die size can have an exponential increase in the cost of the final product. Most cell phones have relatively small margins. Only a few players can get away with high margin hardware, but even they would balk at adding $40 to the cost of the hardware if the majority of their users would never even know the difference.

      As far as the power cost, the optimizations you mentioned are the very reason not to have 8 cores. You get all the power you will neef, fr the immediate future with 4 cores. There simply isn't a big enough improvement in performance with 8 cores for it to be worth the increased cost to manufacture *and* reduced battery life.

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    88. Re:qualcomm is right by Bomarc · · Score: 1

      The Intel 8088 microprocessor was a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on ... run at up to 16 MHz. When announced, the list price of the 8088 was US $124.80.
      I believe the price has come down on them.

      The price of CPU's will always come down. We can hope that software development can keep up with the better CPU's. When makers have better CPU's ... customers will then demand better software to go with the better CPU's.

      Given that the telecoms are taking the cost of the phones anyway, the entire market is falsely driven anyway.

    89. Re:qualcomm is right by jsepeta · · Score: 1

      Sure, I don't use all the processors 100% of the time, but 100% of the time when I'm using ProTools or Logic or Cubase, I rely on the full set of 8 cores to handle my array of virtual synths and samplers.

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    90. Re:qualcomm is right by pla · · Score: 1

      Instead of slimming down a phone as you reduce component size add more battery. And find a way to better manage battery use. And, make use of those battery technologies we hear so much about on Reddit.com.

      But but but... Then you wouldn't need a charger at home, a charger at the office, a charger for each car, another set of the above for your other phone that has exactly the same kind of batteries but a proprietary connector, etc.

      Battery capacity at the light-high-end (cars) remains an open problem. Battery capacity at the low end (phones) - Ccompanies view that as a goddamned opportunity to upsell, not a "problem" they ever want to "fix".

    91. Re:qualcomm is right by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Camera/webcam processing? done on DSP.
      Video game rendering? Not that much multi-threaded. But there may be rare exceptions like Crysis 3.
      Speech recognition? That's old tech, and it would work properly by know if throwing computer power at it fixed it.

    92. Re:qualcomm is right by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      The axis that everyone is forgetting is "depreciation rate of old fab line". If you can put 2x cores on an N-2 process where the the capital expenditure has already been written down and you otherwise have excess capacity, you can make an only slightly crappy part and move an insane volume at a relatively low price which still supports the high end due to compatibility. The relative performance gain from more cores is traded off against the relative performance loss of the old process.

    93. Re:qualcomm is right by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      You seem to have no idea either : multitasking is some time-sharing scheme and may often happily run on a single core. Waiting for calls, bluetooth daemon, input threads are stuff that will use 0.1% of one core. Back in the days your 486 or pentium on win 95 would run solitaire, minesweeper, notepad and explorer.exe just fine, thanks.

    94. Re:qualcomm is right by jkflying · · Score: 1

      When a core hits an IO block the OS hands the core off the next thread that actually needs to do something. An IO bound application is an example of something that needs less cores.

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    95. Re:qualcomm is right by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      no, you could not use many cores with current software. you could maybe use two effectively part of the time.

    96. Re:qualcomm is right by pepty · · Score: 1

      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?

      Someone who would prefer not to have to worry about the security holes on one OS, let alone four?

    97. Re:qualcomm is right by fatphil · · Score: 1

      What complete bollocks. ``make -j 8'' tada - 8 cores in full use.

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      Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
    98. Re:qualcomm is right by kimvette · · Score: 1

      And yet poor thread scheduling often ended up freezing absolutely everything else until that thread handed control back. Win95 allowed both cooperative and preemptive multitasking. When I built my first multiprocessor machine and switched to NT and commented that eventually all PCs will go SMP and I'll never own a single processor PC again, a lot of idiots jeered at it, claiming there is no practical use for SMP on a desktop PC/workstation, and yet here we are - four, six, and eight core PCs, with dual core being the bottom of the line, and 3,000+ core graphics cards being commonplace and more and more apps taking implementing CUDA or OpenCL for even more parallel processing.

      Your view of "I don't understand why multicore CPUs is good for phones, you're dumb" is an incredibly closed-minded view based on how smartphone apps are implemented today, not taking into consideration how the phones could be put to use in months and years to come. That is the same mindset that said PDAs are only for geeks, and yet today practically everybody has a full-blown pocket sized unix box as a telephone with tens or even hundreds of apps installed, watching TV and movies on the go, listening to online streams from radio stations around the world, soccer moms checking their social schedules, people using their phones as cookbooks, people running entire small businesses on phablets and tablets, and a whole slew of other tasks that myopic short-sighted fools said that no one neither needed nor wanted.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    99. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      Your "use" is a list of event-driven GUI-based applications that only use a tiny amount of computing power, and even less when in the background. What you describe would be a colossal waste.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    100. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      Just to be clear, there are reasonable uses for them; the music example you gave could be combined with other frequent or real-time applications like turn-by-turn driving instructions. I'm really, genuinely just picking on the rest of your post.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    101. Re:qualcomm is right by Xicor · · Score: 1

      alright then, if you are so smart, name 20 games that have full 8 core support. you should be able to do that, right? because i can name thousands that have at most dual core support

    102. Re:qualcomm is right by aztracker1 · · Score: 1

      I understand what you are saying.. I am saying that when I checked into ARM servers, the per-cpu cost was actually higher than x86.. it was rather ridiculous, since opteron/xeon servers could do about equal cpu load to electricity usage under load... If they were priced comparably to say per-cpu for even $80/core it would be an easier choice.. but that isn't where they are pricing these things.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    103. Re:qualcomm is right by aztracker1 · · Score: 1

      I am specifically referring to ARM systems, the multi core allows you to run multiple instances... A many-core ARM system could be a pretty great NodeJS server for example (with multiple processes on said system). Per-CPU doesn't need to be as heavy as x86 is, and you can get really good throughput at less power usage. The trouble is when I've looked into ARM servers, the pricing is way more than is competitive.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
  3. They dont do THUMB things? by stanlyb · · Score: 1

    But, but, i thought it is by design, to have the THUMB doing the DUMB things? Why the redirection? Why not just doing the DUMB without the THUMB!

  4. and 640K is all you will ever need. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    another soon to be famous quote

    1. 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.

    2. Re:and 640K is all you will ever need. by camperdave · · Score: 1

      The 8088PC could address one megabyte. It's just that 384K of that was ROM, leaving a max of 640K for RAM.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    3. Re:and 640K is all you will ever need. by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 1

      I remember being amazed back in the early 90s at what the demoscene coders could do in 64k.

    4. Re:and 640K is all you will ever need. by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      True that, the matter of debate was where you put that split i.e. could have been 768K + 256K or something else (incompatible machines could do that choice and have more than 640K max RAM). If max memory had been higher than 640K we might have had trouvles from lack of non-RAM address space anyway and still be stuck well below 1MB anyway. And by the time we could afford that RAM we had 386s and 486s with Windows 3.x and 32bit DOS extenders. It's mostly the 286 mode that didn't get much support by mainstream OSes and applications.

  5. 8 cylinder by donaggie03 · · Score: 1

    No, but if you hook them up right you could end up with an 8 cylinder lawn mower..

    --
    Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
    1. Re:8 cylinder by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Funny

      Add a scoop, spoiler, neon trim and a fart can on the exhaust. Mowed in sixty seconds.

    2. Re:8 cylinder by operagost · · Score: 1

      On the bad side, there's a big red splotch on the lawn and the cat is missing.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    3. Re:8 cylinder by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      Or you could hook up 24 chainsaw engines and run a motorcycle.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzx8Y--UNto

  6. cut the rug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If I tie 8 lawn mower engines together, can I belt up the blades to cut the lawns on each of the 8 motors as well? That would allow for a very wide cut of a large lawn. I think it all depends on the problem set, and how you solve it.

    1. Re:cut the rug by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      if you do it you'll have to put them in two rows so that routes they go over overlap.

      otherwise you'll look stupid after your first run with them on the field :(

      qualcomm is being a bit stupid with analogies though. if you put the cylinders on the same _block_ you would have an 8 cylinder briggs&stratton - AND THAT WOULD FUCKING ROCK! would be rather pointless in a push arrangement lawnmower though, unless you like running like the proverbial wind.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:cut the rug by camperdave · · Score: 1

      would be rather pointless in a push arrangement lawnmower though, unless you like running like the proverbial wind.

      ... or you had 16 foot mowing blades

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    3. Re:cut the rug by maz2331 · · Score: 2

      Sure, since grass cutting is an entirely parallelizeable problem and the cutting of each blade isn't dependent on any other blade. Now, let's assume that you have 16 lawns to cut. Would it be faster to make one monster 8-wide mower that can cut each in three passes then move to the next lawn, or would it be faster to send one mower to each and cut them each in parallel with 24-passes? Remember, there is overhead involved in the move from one lawn to the next.

      More cores only helps when you are solving a problem that doesn't have any non-parallel parts to it. Multitasking different programs fits that description reasonably well (except for contention for a system resource, that is). Crunching a graphic can fit if the algorithm doesn't have any feedback in it.

      Otherwise, cores will be waiting for something to do and you would be better off with fewer that are individually faster.

    4. Re:cut the rug by adolf · · Score: 1

      Now, let's assume that you have 16 lawns to cut. Would it be faster to make one monster 8-wide mower that can cut each in three passes then move to the next lawn, or would it be faster to send one mower to each and cut them each in parallel with 24-passes? Remember, there is overhead involved in the move from one lawn to the next.

      Overhead? One of these techniques requires one person, one mower, and one transport vehicle. The other requires twenty-four people, twenty-four mowers, and twenty-four transport vehicles.

      Oh, it comes along with twenty-four people to insure, twenty-four people to calculate taxes on, twenty-four people to provide parking for, twenty-four people to feed at the Christmas party, twenty-four people [...].

    5. Re:cut the rug by KevReedUK · · Score: 1

      Overhead? One of these techniques requires one person, one mower, and one transport vehicle. The other requires twenty-four people, twenty-four mowers, and twenty-four transport vehicles.

      Oh, it comes along with twenty-four people to insure, twenty-four people to calculate taxes on, twenty-four people to provide parking for, twenty-four people to feed at the Christmas party, twenty-four people [...].

      Eight people, actually... The 24 was a pass-count where an 8-wide mower would require three passes per lawn (8x3=24).

      I guess you're the type of person who doesn't test well? Been there myself, but I've found that it helps to read the d*#n question properly before answering!?!

      --
      Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
  7. 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.
    1. Re:Not that I disagree... by avandesande · · Score: 2

      He's talking about cpus used in tablets and phones. By the time operating systems and applications are available to use these efficiently these devices will be in the trash.

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
    2. Re:Not that I disagree... by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 1

      >By the time operating systems and applications are available to use these efficiently these devices will be in the trash.

      Isn't that because of the limited processors?

      A fast 8 cores could allow people to use the same tablet for many years through many software upgrades.

    3. Re:Not that I disagree... by kesuki · · Score: 1

      i have an octocore cpu for my main desktop, and the way windows makes it work is they park half the processors and randomly decides which ones to run and which to 'park' as you use it. it uses a larger die than old pcs with single core designs. it also uses less power than many computers i've owned, it idles including display power at 125 watts. and because of cpu parking it doesn't use more power unless you're really using a task that can utilize the full cpu on all 8 cores. it really is quite fast and has a very fast gpu too.

    4. Re:Not that I disagree... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      4) Belittle other people's ideas to prevent them from shipping products based on some marketing idea that more = better.

      Normally I would agree with your list but Qualcomm doesn't fit into any of the above categories. There's certainly no patents on 8 core vs 4 core systems, I doubt you could get any lower quality/price point than Qualcomm, and the company is full of smart engineers who have arguably come up with some of the best SoCs on the market (certainly the most power efficient).

    5. Re:Not that I disagree... by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      My first thought was to think of today's "supercomputers" which are rack upon rack of individual systems clustered, not badass huge SIMD iron like they used to be.

  8. VM by Taibhsear · · Score: 5, Funny

    And my virtual machines say, "Shut your pie hole, Chandrasekher."

    1. Re:VM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      to be fair you're not running VMs on a phone/mobile unit.

    2. Re:VM by aztracker1 · · Score: 2

      Yet...

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    3. Re:VM by froggymana · · Score: 3, Interesting

      to be fair you're not running VMs on a phone/mobile unit.

      Are you sure? Android phones will most likely be running a Dalvik Virtual Machine.

      --
      "To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
    4. Re:VM by mr_da3m0n · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well there's a difference between that kind of virtual machine (target) and an actual virtualized system. The former is, in essence, just an application that happens to target a virtual platform that gets compiled just in time to native code during execution. The latter is a full virtualized system with 'hardware'. The specifics of that depends on the hypervisor employed.

    5. Re:VM by acoustix · · Score: 1

      to be fair you're not running VMs on a phone/mobile unit.

      Not yet. But it is coming. http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/mobile_virtualization-mobile_device_management-consumerization,1-34.html

      VMware has been demoed several prototypes. It's coming, but probably not until battery life increases.

      --
      "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
  9. Prediction by Qzukk · · Score: 2

    Aug __, 201_

    Qualcomm's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher was on hand for the unveiling of their new 8 core processor. Calling it a masterpiece of engineering, Chandrasekher compared it to a Ferrari, and called single core processors dumb. "Why drive around on a lawnmower when you could ride an 8 cylinder Ferrari? That's dumb." When asked if they would be continuing to sell single core processors, he replied "We don't do dumb things."

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  10. Related to Seymour Cray - 1024 Chickens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Sounds like what Seymor Cray's famous quote

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

    Note quite exactly the same..but it's similar...BTW Cray turned out to be wrong. That being said I'd GLADLY pay money to watch 1024 chickens plow a field!

    1. Re:Related to Seymour Cray - 1024 Chickens by emilper · · Score: 1

      just don't feed those chicken for a day, they'll plow the field better than the two oxen

  11. Octomom by avandesande · · Score: 1

    Is she eight times the mother of a woman with one kid?

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
    1. Re:Octomom by drcheap · · Score: 1

      No, but there was definitely a high degree of parallelism going on inside her for approximately 9 months.

  12. 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.
    1. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

      Too bad cray was wrong. Go into any server room and see.

    2. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Imagine all those fucking chickens creeping up on your house, harrar! Cluck a doodle doo!

    3. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by h4rr4r · · Score: 1, Funny

      Why would that bother me?

      I would round them up and sell them. You are a pretty terrible troll. Not creative either.

      So what is wrong with your life that you choose to spend it this way? Have you considered making a change for the better? Maybe doing something useful with your life? Or just ending it?

    4. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      Sure, but not the strongest.
      This is why AMD still manages to sell CPUs for VMware setups. Well until recently, when things got even worse for them. Lots of cheap CPUs are really good for some tasks.

    5. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by a1cypher · · Score: 1

      Hrm... how many oxen could you buy for the price of 1024 chickens?

    6. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by aaronb1138 · · Score: 1

      I hope you are being sarcastic. I love all the 'tards saying they want many cores so they can run VMs on their phones. If they had half a clue and really wanted to improve virtualization and overall flexibility of their phone, they would want a RAM on demand system where the OS and hardware could online and offline RAM chips based on utilization. For virtualization, 4-8 GB of RAM would rock, but for battery usage, 0.5-1 GB makes more sense for screen off / VMs suspended time. Android would need to be taught some new tricks, since it likes to hold everything in memory forever (balloon & shutdown process?). Virtualization is exactly the consolidation of many machines which at one time would have had 1-4 cores of their own to each share just the fraction of a core that they need to run correctly and to take turns grabbing higher amounts of compute resources when necessary.

      Ultimately, Cray was exactly right.

      Massively parallel computing is not useful on a consumer, day-to-day scale. Even most IT resources and use cases rarely need more than 25-40% of any one resources capabilities at a time, with the exception of the fact that permanent storage is universally slow as crap and holds back the rest of the industry (HDD, SSD, SANs, NAS, etc.). Answering scientific questions computationally is frankly a rare use case, and the only justification for massively parallel work.

    7. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by operagost · · Score: 2

      If you were going into battle, which would you rather use? Two guys with machine guns or 1,024 with AR-15s?

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    8. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by kimvette · · Score: 1

      I'd choose the two holding machine guns, since they're far more likely to have been trained in military strategy, when you consider that the AR-15 is a consumer-oriented hunting/home defense/target shooting rifle derived from the M-16.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    9. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 1

      Qualcomm aren't using CPUs analgous to strong oxen. They're using two chickens, otherwise known as ARMs.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    10. Re:Similar quote from Seymour Cray by danomac · · Score: 1

      I was curious so I looked it up. Live chicken range from $5-$15 per, you can get a team of oxen (usually sold in pairs) from $800-$4000.

      Assuming the expensive side, for the price of 1024 chicken you could almost get 4 teams, or 8 oxen. So, yeah, don't waste time with chickens...

  13. Power/Heat? by HWguy · · Score: 1

    How much power will this thing take when all eight cores are running? Unless there is some significant breakthrough that MediaTek has yet to announce, this seems like a major issue for this chip, at least for mobile applications.

  14. What he meant to say by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

    "Eight core processors are dumb (until we produce one) !!"

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  15. Niche market by Aryden · · Score: 1

    most people aren't going to use 8 cores, right now. For datacenter purposes, yes 8+ is needed, but your average user isn't running software that can make use of all 8 cores. Hell, I am an avid gamer and software developer and almost nothing I do uses up the 4 cores I have.

    1. Re:Niche market by Urkki · · Score: 1

      If you are a software developer, and don't find use for arbitrarily large number of cores... Time to get up to date! Ok, if you program in scripting languages, never mind. Also, if you are forced to program with crippled toolchain, which can't do parallel compilation, never mind. Also, if you can't afford enough memory to cache entire source tree or an SSD, never mind.

      But otherwise, I don't think there are non-server computers on market, which have more cores that can be used by a software developer.

      And it's not about how large portion of the time all cores are need, in fact it is the opposite... The less real time they are all utilized, the better. Ideal solution would be, if all compiles would take a fraction of a second. So a 50 compiles per day would still keep all cores utilized just for a few seconds per day.

      And the same applies to all kinds of media editing of course. Ideally, every editing operation able to make use of all cores will take a fraction of a second, so indeed, ideally most cores would be idling most of the time.

      This would go beautifully in mobile space too. Imagine a mobile browser, where rendering a web page would take irrelevantly short time, with all cores briefly utilized, then all but one or two going to 0-power idle state, waiting for next time things need to be updated.

      Summary: the less real time you have all cores utilized, the better, as long as the time when all cores are being utilized is time when user is waiting for the computer.

    2. Re:Niche market by MCRocker · · Score: 1

      If you are a software developer, and don't find use for arbitrarily large number of cores... Time to get up to date!

      That's why I'm so excited by the new breed of languages like Scala.

      Sure, there's no silver bullet to automagically solve all parallel programming problems, but languages like Scala have features like Parallel Collections libraries, functional programming and Parallel Domain Specific Languages that can abstract enough of the problems of parallel programming away that journeyman programmers have a decent chance of being able to work effectively with multiple cores.

      I'm somewhat disappointed by the adoption curve. The reluctance to move toward an actual solution to the problem is somewhat surprising.

      This is also the real reason behind NoSQL databases... the need to scale horizontally instead of vertically is the primary driver, not a disdain for SQL.

      --
      Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
    3. Re:Niche market by Aryden · · Score: 1

      absolutely, there are man instances where it should/would work and it's exciting to see them come to fruition, but unfortunately, most of the developer world is stuck in the mud with scripting and software systems that just cant utilize that many cores... yet. There has a to be a good catch-up period where the software actually uses what you have available, not what the developer had available.

  16. Umm, you can join engines together by sjbe · · Score: 1

    You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari.

    If Ferrari is the one doing it then yes they can claim that for whatever that gets them. And you certainly can join engines together to make a larger one. A W-16 is basically just two V-8s lashed together.

    Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, 'We don't do dumb things.'"

    Maybe not but he clearly says dumb things.

    1. Re:Umm, you can join engines together by jkflying · · Score: 1

      It doesn't make sense for a motorcycle. Because ultimately, the phone needs to fit in your pocket.

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
  17. "Dumb"? by harvestsun · · Score: 1

    Seriously, since when did it become acceptable for high profile executives to describe their competition in terms like "dumb"? Have we devolved to 5-year-olds? What is "dumb" is trying to make an argument without using any facts, and resorting to a vague metaphors about lawnmowers and spaghetti.

    1. Re:"Dumb"? by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      Seriously, since when did it become acceptable for high profile executives to describe their competition in terms like "dumb"? Have we devolved to 5-year-olds? What is "dumb" is trying to make an argument without using any facts, and resorting to a vague metaphors about lawnmowers and spaghetti.

      maybe 130 years ago. it's a pretty old american business pr tactic. your competitor is doing something that can be seen as more advanced and you don't want to since the old thing is more profitable and you can provide that, so you just call them dumb for doing the new thing.

      like streaming movies online is dumb, distributing on floppies instead of cartridges is dumb, letting competitors write sw for your platform is dumb, letting the users write sw for your platform is dumb, letting subscribers to use the internet for unlimited amounts is dumb and so forth. usually it means that the company is screwing it's customers and would like to keep doing so.. oh well wp8 phones don't really need more than one core anyways, since can't do shit on them anyways so why bother coupled with that you can just bribe MS to dictating which soc's the vendors are allowed to use. yeah, qualcomm is pretty sucky and since they don't(?) have their own fabs their yield risks are maybe going through the roof if they try too fancy shit.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  18. 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.

    1. Re:Cores matter depending on the software by flargleblarg · · Score: 1

      Software that's single-threaded, no it doesn't benefit from more cores.

      Well that's not entirely true. If you're running several single-threaded programs simultaneously, your computer will still run faster with multiple cores than it would with a single core (at the same clock speed, obviously). But if a single-threaded program is the only thing running on the system, then it won't see benefits from multiple cores.

    2. Re:Cores matter depending on the software by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1

      Well, even something as simple as a Tetris game should have a couple of threads. One to handle input events, another to handle the dropping of the next tile and reorienting it in response to messages from the input thread. The browser should dump all network IO off into separate threads using a thread pool to avoid swamping the phone on pages with hundreds of separate elements. A voice calling program would have one thread handling voice input, one handling voice output and one handling input events from the screen. You're unlikely to run into the situations I deal with at work where a "simple" program is one that only handles a few dozen simultaneous threads, but only the simplest apps wouldn't benefit from a couple or three threads to segment the workload.

  19. Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

    If 8-core procs are dumb, then Intel, AMD, and Nvidia must be absolutely fucking retarded to make products with hundreds of cores in them.

    Just because software doesn't use it right now, it doesn't mean that software won't use it soon.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    1. Re:Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Intel, AMD, and nVidia are targetting utterly different markets than Qualcomm.

    2. Re:Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by Mike+Frett · · Score: 1

      You're comparing Desktop CPUs to Phone CPUs. Last time I checked, you can't open 100 tabs in a browser on a Phone or have several 'Windows' and Apps running all over the place. Someone may need to correct me though, I don't own any Phones. However, I can imagine it would be pretty silly looking having several open windows and tons of tabs on a tiny phone screen.

      If we ever got to that point, I could see screen sizes getting larger to the point where the phones wouldn't fit in ones pocket anymore. Thus, at what point would we cease calling such a device Mobile. If you want to walk around with a small computer, then lets build one so the Phones can get smaller again and serve their purpose; to make Calls.

      For my personal Opinion, AMD gets too much flak. Their multi-core CPUs are awesome and do outstanding multi-threading, especially the Bulldozers. People gave AMD bad reviews because the Software used to benchmark was optimized for Intel (as we saw recently) and wasn't yet optimal for benchmarking that new design. I've always said, if you want good single-threaded performance for a premium, go Intel. If you want great multi-processing at a discounted price, go AMD. And I stand by that. The Intel people here will mod me down, but when the Linux benchmarks were released for Bulldozer, we saw it beating Intel if anyone remembers that.

      TL;DR: Desktop CPUs are not the same as Phone CPUs. If you want them to be, better come up with a new type of battery and a new way to dissipate all that heat.

    3. Re:Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2

      But yet when mobile CPUs went from single core to dual core, everyone thought that was a massive enhancement. And when dual-core mobile CPUs are now giving way to 4-way mobile CPUs, everyone seems to think that's a fantastic idea too.

      So why is 4-way to 8-way utterly stupid all of a sudden, just because this guy says so?

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    4. Re:Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by jkflying · · Score: 1

      Who said 4 core mobile was awesome? 2 cores, particularly for Android, is great because it lets the GC run in the background without halting your main GUI thread. Beyond that, well, your benchmark scores increase, but that's about it.

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    5. Re:Intel and Nvidia must be retarded then. by bingoUV · · Score: 1

      Yes, Linux could have been one saviour of AMD. And how does AMD treat Linux? By crashy, poor performance drivers. Intel started merging into Linux codeline for haswell support a year before releasing the chip. AMD starts to provide reasonable open source drivers a year after releasing the chip, and it reaches Intel driver quality in maybe 5 years.

      Power problems of 5 year old AMD chips have recently been fixed, with mixed results.

      --
      Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
  20. Don't u feel dum. by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    They used to say no tractor needed 8 jet engines, either!!!!1!2111!!

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  21. Exynos Octo by Guspaz · · Score: 1

    People realize that the Exynos Octo they're talking about isn't usable as an 8-core CPU, right?

    The thing has four A15 cores, and four A7 cores. Only one of those groups can be used at a time. If you're using one or more A15 cores, the A7s are disabled, and vice versa.

    I'm not actually sure what the point of what Samsung is doing is. The A15s can presumably be power gated, so switching to the "low power" option only makes sense if it can use less power than a single A15 core in a lower power state. Do the four A7 cores use less power than a single A15?

    It seems to me like pairing up a single A7 with four A15s in a 4+1 solution (similar to what nVidia does with Tegra, except not using the same type of core as the +1) makes more sense.

    1. Re:Exynos Octo by symbolset · · Score: 1

      There is an 8 core phone available now in China. $180 off contract.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    2. Re:Exynos Octo by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      I think you mixed some 15s and 7s in that comment...?

      I realize that the A7 can be used most of the time, the question is do four A7s simultaneously active use less power than a single A15?

    3. Re:Exynos Octo by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      Are you sure? Because as far as I can tell, the MediaTek MT6592 is the first mobile SoC to feature eight homogeneous ARM cores (all A7s, in that case). Some googling shows some Chinese SoCs that use the term "8-core" to refer to their GPU rather than their CPU, but that's all I could find.

  22. Eight-Core Processor Says Qualcomm is dumb dumb... by pergamon · · Score: 1

    dumb
    dumb
    dumb
    dumb
    dumb
    dumb

  23. Apparently Qualcomm is Evil by xylo36 · · Score: 1

    "Dark Helmet: So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."

  24. Qualcomm has management that knows tech by jphamlore · · Score: 1

    It's surprising to me that tech forums aren't praising Qualcomm to the skies for actually having management that understands tech. How many other major American companies have a CEO who earned a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley ? I think Qualcomm's CEO as an example is especially important considering the utter disaster Dr. Hector Ruiz was at AMD.

  25. Re:qualcomm is not right by HermMunster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It is the fallacy behind the Pi. I have 4 of them and use them for everything. However I'm not interested in taking significantly limited resources and programming against that in an effort to build my skills. I want the power. So a quad core Pi with SATA, Wifi, 2-4 GB of RAM, using just 5 watts of power, and much more, for $20.00 is just fine by me. I'd use that too. So would every other developer. I'm sure current developers hate the limitations of some of the devices out there.

    --
    You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
  26. 8-core owner by sunami · · Score: 1

    As an owner of an 8-core CPU, he's right.... for now. There's a pitiful number of uses for me to have anything more than 4 cores (some games I've seen dip into a 5th core for asset loading, and that's it). Hopefully when the PS4/XB1 come out developers will start writing games to use more than 3 cores for game logic. Unless browsers start loading pages outside of a single thread, I'm unlikely to need anything beyond a 2-core system for non-gaming.

    1. Re:8-core owner by Raistlin77 · · Score: 1

      Your example of pitiful uses doesn't make him right. Sure, there are few things that can take advantage of 8 cores right now. But if there were not 8 cores to take advantage of, there would never be anything made to take advantage of them.

    2. Re:8-core owner by TheSkepticalOptimist · · Score: 1

      Wow, my head exploded from your ignorance.

      I really doubt there is ANY game that only uses 4 or your 8 cores. Also consider you running a multi-tasking OS, even if that was the case, then be glad that your Windows Update spinning up in the background is not going to compete with the other "unused cores". I have yet to see a single multi-core system run without all cores running SOME process on them, what you perceive as "useless" is actually good distribution of processing power so that all cores are not grinding away at 99% and instead sharing the load.

      And yes, browsers started using more than one thread a while ago.

      Fire up your Task Manager one day and educate yourself.

      I'd agree that 8 cores is waay too much for you, but your statement is false and ignorant in general.

      --
      I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
  27. So what do they think... by Sentrion · · Score: 1

    ...about Thomas Sterling's and Donald Becker's Beowulf Cluster at NASA?

  28. Bad example by sinequonon · · Score: 1

    No you don't use eight lawnmowers to build a Ferrari, you use eight lawnmowers to cut eight times as much grass at once. Dumb example, Mr. Chandrasekher.

    --
    -Bob-
  29. large system compiles by Chirs · · Score: 1

    At the previous company I worked for, a nightly software build ran for 15 hours on a couple of quad-core machines with 16GB of RAM. Building for a single target could easily take 6 hrs. I'd love to have a 32-core build machine with 128GB RAM and a terabyte of SSD.

    1. Re:large system compiles by Aryden · · Score: 1

      sure, those are one of those niche instances though.

    2. Re:large system compiles by KevReedUK · · Score: 1

      At the previous company I worked for, a nightly software build ran for 15 hours on a couple of quad-core machines with 16GB of RAM. Building for a single target could easily take 6 hrs. I'd love to have a 32-core build machine with 128GB RAM and a terabyte of SSD.

      Yes, but....

      Run it off a battery and (try to... with current tech, this thing would be kinda chunky!) stick it in your pocket. You'll have a very short race between two end results, your trousers igniting from the heat or the battery dying.

      Call me eccentric, but I think I'd be interested to watch such a test just to see which end result wins out!

      --
      Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
  30. there are a few uses by Chirs · · Score: 1

    Software compiling can often use as many cores as you throw at it. Video transcoding is parallelizable as well.

  31. I'll say it by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Informative

    You know what multiple cores are great for, that a very large segment of the population does? Image processing. A very large subset of things you can do to images responds very well to slicing an image into [#ofCores] slices, and then whacking away at them in [#ofCores] parallel.

    I write SDR software, that kind of programming can really benefit from multicore hardware too. At least, the way I write it, it does.

    Anyway, I think ol Qualcomm is lacking a certain basic understanding of what multicore architecture brings to the table. Er, phone. Desktop. Tablet. Whatever.

    But that's ok. Manufacturers that remain mired in the past fall to their competitors and so self-select themselves out of the game.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:I'll say it by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Informative

      Most of the tasks in this category that you might see running on a phone are executing on dedicated hardware within the SoC.

      Qualcomm's Hexagon DSPs are pretty neat, and a typical Qcom chip has a few - they just never market them as extra cores, but they ARE there.

      Remember, Qualcomm's core market are phones and tablets, and that is the context in which their comments regarding MTK's octa-A9 should be taken.

      Also keep in mind that Qualcomm is coming off of a nice rosy year where their dual Krait SoCs were routinely smoking quad-A9s on typical smartphone/tablet workloads.

      Another thing to keep in mind is that, so far, nearly all multicore ARM systems suffer in terms of power management when more than one CPU is lit up - in many cases, many of the deeper idle modes become unavailable if more than one core is active. This is even true on Qualcomm's chips, but at least they can clock each core asynchronously. All of MTK's chips so far are synchronously clocked, which means that if additional cores are lit up, they run at the same speed as the others, often with crippled cpuidle.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    2. Re:I'll say it by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Exactly, as much as things can be sped up by using multicore technology, they can be sped up even more (while using less power) by implementing them in hardware. It's the reason the Raspberry Pi can play BluRay quality video but can't show a Linux Desktop without a whole lot of lag. They'd be much better off adding more specialized processors to deal with things that are common on phones than to use generic processors that just suck up a lot of power without speeding things up significantly anyway.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    3. 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.

    4. Re:I'll say it by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

      Anyway, I think ol Qualcomm is lacking a certain basic understanding of what multicore architecture brings to the table. Er, phone. Desktop. Tablet. Whatever.

      But that's ok. Manufacturers that remain mired in the past fall to their competitors and so self-select themselves out of the game.

      Except Qualcomm has a point.

      An 8 core SoC has 4 powerful A15-ish cores, and 4 power efficient A7-ish cores. Now, ARM's big.LITTLE allows for OS awareness of all 8 cores and their asymmetry, or you can treat it as a 4-core system and perform a direct switch.

      The reason for this is the A15 is a power hog. It's fast, but it turns energy into heat very quickly. The A7 is slower, but turns less energy into heat. When you're gaming, you want the big beefy cores to give you maximum FPS goodness or whatever, then when you're back to listening ot MP3s, switch it for the power sippers.

      Now, Qualcomm has skin in the game in that their 4 core Kraits are able to do DVFS on each individual core (so each core runs as fast as it needs to be, and no faster), which means it doesn't need a secondary batch of slower processors because it can run the main ones slower and more power efficiently..

      Of course, what 8-core purveyors DON'T mention is you cannot run all 4 A15 cores for more than a few minutes at a time - you'll destroy the SoC because it overheats. That's how bad the A15s are. If you can use 2 A15s and keep the other 2 idle, for the most pare, you can do this forever. But put some load in and you'll need to throttle the A15s - 100-100-50-50% at first, and if temperatures still aren't cooling, start throttling the slower ones even more, turning them off if need be.

      And in phones there's no space for the heatsink and fan, and often there's a PoP memory on top, so you can't even stick a heatsink on if you wanted.

      Thermal management is extremely important on these octacores. especially as the system can't be cooled traditionally.

      Until Qualcomm makes a server chip, they do have a point - what's the point of quad or octacore if you're not able to keep them running at full load because the hardware is limiting the speed?

      Of course, anyone will know that benchmarks only run for a few minutes at a time. Aggressive core management also helps (switching to A7s as much as possible to keep the chip cooler).

    5. Re:I'll say it by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Which are great points until you realize that Qualcomm targets lots of lower power systems that have almost no reason to run many threads and graphics can be done on a much more efficient GPU.

    6. Re:I'll say it by HermMunster · · Score: 1

      Or even, at least, want to plug it into a docking station and have that phone as our desktop computer where we want full power full throttle full speed ahead.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    7. Re:I'll say it by HermMunster · · Score: 1

      Redesign is divine. Redesign it and make it work properly at 8 to 16 or even to 96 cores.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    8. Re:I'll say it by sjames · · Score: 1

      We might want to do that one day as well, but today doesn't seem to be the day for that either. Cellphones don't have enough memory or storage for that and their OS is clunky for desktop use.

    9. Re:I'll say it by swb · · Score: 1

      Maybe the phone-specific idea is that you want more, low-power cores for handling low-CPU background tasks (fetch email, etc) which would let you have fewer high-power cores for interactive tasks without some of the bogging that happens on phones when there's active background activity.

    10. Re:I'll say it by sjames · · Score: 1

      Still not today. I can't really blame Qualcomm if they want to see if that niche catches on before they commit a lot of resources to a product that only makes sense there.

    11. Re:I'll say it by swalve · · Score: 1

      When the software can take advantage of multiple cores, then fine. But not very much does. You just get multiple programs running at one time, and in my personal use case, very rarely are more than 2-4 executables trying to run at once. When Qualcomm sees phone software that needs more cores, they will put them in.

    12. Re:I'll say it by swalve · · Score: 1

      You ain't just whistling Dixie. I just got a tablet with a dual core atom, and I was expecting it to be capable at best. But upon using it, it has shown to be pretty goddamned fast for 80% of what anyone does. When I looked at the block diagram of the new Atom chips, I can see why. Dedicated hardware blobs for everything.

      Reminds me of my first computer DVD player. It was some kind of Creative thing, where there was an adapter card with a hardware decoder on it. It played DVDs perfectly and beautifully on a Pentium 75. Only until a few years ago have I seen similar quality coming from general purpose hardware and software decoding.

    13. Re:I'll say it by pla · · Score: 1

      Qualcomm's Hexagon DSPs are pretty neat, and a typical Qcom chip has a few - they just never market them as extra cores, but they ARE there.

      It takes no more work (in most cases) to write code that takes advantage of a million general-purpose cores than it does to properly take advantage of two cores (well, okay, two counts as a special case - Let's say three-or-more). If, however, I need to target a special subset of hardware to get adequate performance, and only one brand out of a dozen supports that hardware - Yeah, see ya, hope you enjoy vendor lock-in, because no one else will support their custom crap.

      And I say that as a firmware engineer who has done exactly the opposite of what I say here - But when I bother coding to custom hardware, I expect it to scream, not just make routine tasks tolerable.

    14. Re:I'll say it by LurkerXXX · · Score: 1

      You know what the GPU has? A hell of a lot of parallel pipes processing. Kinda like multiple multiple CPUs, but specialized for certain kinds of calculations.

    15. Re: I'll say it by putaro · · Score: 1

      Once upon a time you could buy an electric motor and move it around between different appliances. I think the concept of moving your phone around and plugging it in various places will fade away as well.

    16. Re:I'll say it by 21mhz · · Score: 1

      Some reviews report that the Nokia Lumia 1020 strains to process frames from its monster 41 Mpix sensor, because they didn't go for a dedicated image processor like they did with the Nokia 808. So when Windows Phone finally gets support for SoCs with more than two cores, this is where it will help. But yes, this is the only case I can think of where more than two cores are needed on a phone.

      --
      My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
    17. Re:I'll say it by 21mhz · · Score: 1

      The software must be reworked as well to match this grade of parallelism. As things stand, this is not happening even to the degree that would load 4 cores for any tasks except the "embarrassingly parallel" ones, like image processing.

      --
      My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
    18. Re: I'll say it by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

      From my experience multi threading is a weak point amongst many programmers, with few getting it right.

      Multi threading is about having the right tools and architectural understanding, since without it you might aswell focus on making your application work well in sinle threaded mode - I say this because without the right understanding you are going to end up with deadlocks, race conditions and code that might end up being slower.

      --
      Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    19. Re:I'll say it by sjames · · Score: 1

      That is a good case for quad core or a specialized core for the cameras, but 8 might still be excessive.

      I can see 8 cores being useful in some situations at some point, particularly if camera resolution continues to increase, I just don't see the current need to be so large and obvious that I would criticize Qualcomm for not seeing the need.

    20. Re: I'll say it by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 1

      Also, some tasks are simply not parallelizable. Image processing is one of the exceptions, but for most image processing operations out there (such as JPEG compression and HDR compositing), there is dedicated hardware on most ARM devices.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  32. load average: 8.44, 8.57, 7.90 by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    I'm on an 8 core (well 4 but with hyperthreading) and I'm running my typical workload and my load average is over 8.

    Arithmetic implies that I could make use of a 16 core system today.

    No idea what the load average is on a crappy tablet/phone under a typical use case (games? browser?). But if ARM ever reaches into the realm of business workstations, it will want to have more than 4 cores.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:load average: 8.44, 8.57, 7.90 by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      4 cores taking 1W total for 2 seconds versus 8 cores taking 2W total for 1 second. Looks like arithmetic wins again.

      in both cases there are approximately the same number of scheduler events, the scheduler's work is more about how many threads need to be scheduled and not about how many you actually schedule at any given instant. (well single core stuff is a lot easier to schedule, but we're not talking about that)

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    2. Re: load average: 8.44, 8.57, 7.90 by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      N to M versus N to 1. Because you usually have the potential for more processes ready to run than you have CPUs.

      It is quite simple to write schedulers for single core systems. And you have simplier locking as well because you aren't dealing with true concurrancy, only reentrancy.
      Part of this is because the "best strategy" is only a little better than a relatively simple dead line scheduler. You'll still have a system that stalls on a heavy I/O load, but at least the CPU is divided up pretty fairly.

      The difficulty isn't a huge deal, as it has already been solved. But it took *nix kernels quite a while before they could deal with multi-processor systems that wouldn't stall on simple syscalls. A "best strategy" scheduler for 64 cpus has proven to be pretty difficult, probably because they share a very finite amount of I/O bandwidth.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  33. Re:Strapping motors together - Bugatti Veyron by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    How much horsepower if I tie 16 lawnmowers together?

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  34. Didn't Mythbusters do something similar for NVidia by Anaerin · · Score: 1

    The video is Here. Or, if you want to refute their "Strap lawnmower engines together to make a ferrari", I'd like to go one step further and point out this 24-chainsaw-engine Motorbike.

  35. Power? by hawguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    I thought the reasoning behind multiple cores was so you could power off the ones you're not using. It's not that you're taking 8 lawnmower engines and turning them into an 8 cylinder Ferrari engine, but you're putting 8 smaller lawnmower engines on your lawnmower so instead of using the big 80HP engine when you're just trimming a narrow stretch of grass, you only need to power up one 10HP engine while the rest of them remain powered off. If you're cutting wider stretch of grass, you can use 2 engines, etc. So you save energy by only using as many cores (engines) that you need for the task.

    1. Re:Power? by ygtai · · Score: 1

      The last time I mowed it was hard for me to operate two mowers at the same time...

    2. Re:Power? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      The last time I mowed it was hard for me to operate two mowers at the same time...

      It's hard to use two computers at the same time too, so just like you would 8 cores in one computer rather than have 8 computers with 1 core each, you'd put 8 motors on one mower deck that span the width of the deck, and only start the motors that you need for the width of grass you want to cut.

      The cores -> lawnmower analogy is not the best, but it wasn't my idea.

    3. Re:Power? by eyenot · · Score: 1

      but it wasn't my idea.

      Good excuse when you're in the boss's office explaining why the application you coded isn't using all 8 of the customer's cores to operate faster.

      Also make sure to tell him it's hard to use two lawnmowers at once, maybe you'll qualify for some kind disability.

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
    4. Re:Power? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      but it wasn't my idea.

      Good excuse when you're in the boss's office explaining why the application you coded isn't using all 8 of the customer's cores to operate faster.

      I could be honest and say "Sorry boss, I haven't been paying any attention to CPU trends for the past few years and didn't realize that the CPU makers are using more (but slower) cores and just assumed that they'd keep coming out with faster and faster CPU clockspeeds. Guess I should have spent a little more time on parallelizing my app."

    5. Re:Power? by eyenot · · Score: 1

      ... ... ... that response is plain and straightforward. Nowhere did you attempt to relate a sense of irony or use sarcasm to express smug indifference. "I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul."

      Yeah that would be the natural response to the hypothetical Angry Boss.

      I would say something along the lines of "I thought the OS was going to do that. Somebody should have told me that people were installing an OS on 8 cores that wasn't ready to automatically hand out work to all 8 cores."

      What I can't stand about the core trend is ... well, two things:

      1) One core is slower than the computer I bought second hand in 1998. This does not instill me with a great deal of confidence in the motherboard's ultimate ability to get "R" done.

      2) Manufacturers and retailers no longer care if you know how fast your computer really is or really can be. "It's an i5".

      "How fast is that?"

      "... ... uh ... ... uhhhh ... it's faster than the i3."

      "Where did i4 go?"

      "MANAGER!!! ... you can talk to my manager. I have to help another customer. SECURITY!!! ... don't worry that's not about you. ... um, see ya."

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  36. Here are a couple lawnmowers to prove him wrong by odie2001 · · Score: 1
  37. Why should it make sense? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

    It is marketing bullshit. It is not supposed to make sense.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  38. multithreaded sorts by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For example, lets say you take the same database of names and you want to sort it alphabetically. You can send each chunk of the database off to be sorted on each core, but now you have 8 pieces of the database that are all sorted and need to be merged back into the original list. This extra work of merging and communicating becomes the overhead.

    Nah, you're just doing it wrong. Take list of names, then mark as, or make sublists, the main list with [#ofThreads] of alphabet, which involves no more than looking at the 1st character and using that to target a list - a jump table of [alphabet] size would allow doing this in one instruction. There's a need to make sublists anyway, so creating them in a "deal the deck" way incurs no significant overhead. Hand off to multithread sort, result comes back in already completely in order, just link the new list ends in your [#ofTHreads] order and you're done.

    There are certainly hard-to-parallelize problems, but alphabetizing a list isn't one of them.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:multithreaded sorts by a1cypher · · Score: 2

      I never meant to imply that sorting a list is a hard problem to parallelize. I was just demonstrating that some problems will introduce overhead for interprocess/inter-thread communication.

      A better example might be simulating heat transfer inside of an oven with some stuff inside. You can divide up the volume of space into N equal chunks, but at each iteration the processes must communicate their boundaries to neighbouring chunks. The smaller you make the chunks (ie the more processes) then the more of this boundary condition communications that are necessary and it eats into your speed up.

    2. Re:multithreaded sorts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There are certainly hard-to-parallelize problems, but alphabetizing a list isn't one of them.

      Usually, the answer is to take the Knuth from the shelf and see what he has to say about the problem. More often than not, some algorithm from 50 years ago optimized for tape drives will beat the shit out of what you come up with yourself.

      Asshole.

    3. Re:multithreaded sorts by immortalpob · · Score: 1

      You proposal is still O(n) complexity overhead, you are looping over the array once to assign each item to a processor. It is better then the other proposal in the average case, but to claim it is no significant overhead is false. The entire point he was making is yes it can be done more quickly, but the total work is greater and this is bad if you are mainly concerned about battery life. Furthermore your proposal has very bad worst case performance, consider an array with all entries that start with 'a', you would basically be running the sort as single core and still have O(n) overhead. Multicore processing is hard, that is why it is still so little used.

    4. Re:multithreaded sorts by sjames · · Score: 1

      Actually, the most sensible way is to do a qsort and at each division, place the sublists on a work queue. That works very well but doesn't get you 100% utilization. The biggest holdup is the first iteration where you have a single core parsing the entire list to form two sublists. Then you get 2 cores running half of that time followed by 4 cores running a quarter if the iteration time, etc.

      However, that one is still simple enough to be classified as embarrassingly parallel and it still has sub-linear scaling.

    5. Re:multithreaded sorts by captjc · · Score: 1

      Here was my first thought, split the list into lists and run the sort. It would then be trivial to pop the top of each list, compare and place the next one in line. However, this really only works if there are significantly more records to be sorted than cores.

      --
      Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
    6. Re:multithreaded sorts by captjc · · Score: 1

      Here was my first thought, split the list into lists and run the sort. It would then be trivial to pop the top of each list, compare and place the next one in line. However, this really only works if there are significantly more records to be sorted than cores.

      Damn HTML Filter, I meant to say split the list into /n-cores/ lists and run the sort.

      --
      Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
    7. Re:multithreaded sorts by jkflying · · Score: 1

      AKA Parallel Merge sort? Your merging at the end still needs to be done on a single core, so there goes any power advantage you claimed to have. Add to that, your CPUs will all fight with each other over the limited memory bandwidth, making it even worse.

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    8. Re:multithreaded sorts by Sardaukar86 · · Score: 1

      Thanks! As a sysadmin rather than a programmer, your thoughts and fyngyrz's reply were very interesting and highly informative.

      Gah, when I re-read that it sounds like sarcasm. It's not! The hypotheticals as much as the real-world examples of stuff people work with is what keeps /. fresh for me.

      --
      ..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
  39. Dumb analogy by Raistlin77 · · Score: 1

    Hey Qualcomm, if you're going to use an analogy to show how your competition is dumb, you may want to make sure the analogy you choose doesn't make you look even dumber. Of course you don't throw 8 engines together to make an 8-cylinder engine. You throw 8 cylinders together within a single engine. You don't throw 8 single-core cpus together to make an 8-core cpu. You throw 8 cores together within a single cpu.

  40. You PUSSY! by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 1
    http://www.ah.nl/appie/zoeken?rq=6+blad

    SIX blades! The best REAL men can get.

    Oh and lifehacker or something like that did a user survey and the five blade does end as the most popular. People can joke all they want but they want a safe easy shave in the morning.

    And how many cores do the new consoles have? Both 8. But hey, Sony and MS are both stupid...

    Well there goes my argument.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  41. Bad analogy by Agares · · Score: 1

    I don't see why he is making the analogy that cores are seperate engines. It's more like each core is a cylinder. That is a much better analogy in my opinion, and makes far more sense.

  42. 8 cores but only 4 used at a time by Big_Breaker · · Score: 2

    Qualcomm is likely referring to Samsung's octo core "big.LITTLE" SoCs. These chips have 4 performance cores and 4 power sipping cores. Software switches between performance and power saving modes. These chips make sense anywhere quad core makes sense AND they can be a little more power efficient.

    This 4+4 strategy is basically the next iteration of power saving through dark silicon. Transistors are cheap so use piles of them but only power on the ones necessary at the time. Having 4 power saving cores seems like overkill but I imagine directly paralleling the 4 performance cores may make the switching more seemless / faster.

    1. Re:8 cores but only 4 used at a time by jkflying · · Score: 1

      The problem is that each switch causes your cache lines to flush, so it only makes sense firing up a big core if you have something big to do. It seems that Qualcomm has got their execution speed and power consumption just as competitive (or better) as the big.LITTLE scheme, so until their current strategy fails I don't think their idea of making the cores they do have more efficient can really be discarded.

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
    2. Re:8 cores but only 4 used at a time by edxwelch · · Score: 1

      No, they are talking about MediaTek's new 8 core SoC: http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32068-mediatek-unveils-first-real-eight-core-soc
      It's not big.LITTLE. It's eight ARM Cortex A7s.
      Qualcomm is right. 8 core is stupid. In fact, 4 core is also stupid, for the same reasons. The only reason 4 core exists is marketing.

    3. Re:8 cores but only 4 used at a time by Misagon · · Score: 1

      Yes, but MediaTek is who is claiming that its CPU with eight equal cores is better than 4+4 big.LITTLE.
      Qualcomm is saying "No, it's not".

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    4. Re:8 cores but only 4 used at a time by edxwelch · · Score: 1

      As far as I know Qualcomm doesn't have any SoC which is 4+4 big.LITTLE

    5. Re:8 cores but only 4 used at a time by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      TFA is about a real 8-core made by "MediaTek"

  43. Re:8 cylinder vs 8 engines - both have one task by Raistlin77 · · Score: 1

    If cars only do one thing, then so do computers. Cars move, computers compute. The engine in your car, on the other hand, doesn't only perform one task. It provides power to turn the wheels, power to all of the electrical systems, power for steering, power for shifting, power for braking, power to keep you nice and cool (or warm), the list goes on and on.

    An engine could be compared to a CPU. A cylinder could be compared to a core. More/larger cylinders provides more power (generally). More/faster cores provides more processing power. As an 8-cylinder engine is typically more powerful than a 4-cylinder engine, an 8-core CPU is more powerful than a 4-core CPU.

    His analogy is flawed, but only because he is comparing one thing's component (a CPU core) to another thing as a whole (lawnmower engine) instead of its component (a cylinder). His analogy actually proves him to be dumb when it used properly.

  44. Re:Dumbest thing I have read in a while by jimbo · · Score: 1

    Dumb indeed. What you describe would run much more efficiently on one single core. Let the OS distribute the bigger workloads.

  45. Better Benchmarks by SmaryJerry · · Score: 1

    The summary gets it exactly right when it says something like 8 lawnmowers doesn't equal a Ferrari engine. The trouble is it is so difficult to find an actual benchmark for processors that measures speed and reliability. The average person does not get into the details and looks at something like higher hertz is better or more cores is better. All else being equal, this is true. I would confidently say that 50% of the population would buy "8 Core" machine that uses Pentium 1 processors over a single core Pentium 4. Consumers shoot themselves in the foot when they don't do their research before buying a computer. There are so many "features" on current processors that are completely incomparable that buying the best processor becomes a crap shoot unless you want to spend hours searching for real benchmarks.

    1. Re:Better Benchmarks by eyenot · · Score: 1

      Exactly. And to make matters worse, those hours of research are forced on the discriminating user because PC manufacturers no longer advertise processor speeds or relative benchmarks, and massive/chain retailers have no clue what any of that means and typically prefer to hire people who don't care and don't want to hear it, because they want customers who are looking for "that sort of thing" to go elsewhere rather than take up floorspace sounding kooky and making the other customers look up and scratch their heads. ("Huh? Did he say something about numbers? I thought the computer just herp-derp'd the video-nets up to the HD audio Monster fibers.")

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  46. The Chandrasekher Limit is now 8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The Chandrasekher Limit is now 8 down from 2.864 × 10^30.
    Pray that Qualcomm does not reduce it any further.

  47. Depends on your workload by davidwr · · Score: 1

    If you have 8 busy processes (or threads, or whatever you call them) and your architecture can give each one a core, AND there aren't other bottlenecks like memory, I/O, etc., then you can utilize those 8 cores pretty well.

    But if you have only one or two ready-to-run processes/threads/whatever at a time, OR if there is contention elsewhere, then yeah, it's a waste.

    What else is new?

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  48. Wilkinson blade by phorm · · Score: 1

    Not being very knowledgeable on razors, where would one find a Wilkinson blade and/or appropriate razor?
    An amazon search turns up a Parker 60r/91r and Shark/Bluebird blades

    1. Re:Wilkinson blade by cianduffy · · Score: 1

      The UK (and other countries nearby) - Wilkinson Sword is the brand. Schick is the same products in the US from memory.

    2. Re:Wilkinson blade by GNious · · Score: 1

      I'm from scandinavia, and had to import mine - now living in Belgium, I can get them in most stores.
      Try looking for online stores that specializes in (male) grooming.

      That said, it seems that Gilette has a monopoly in many places - no idea why, 'cuz they are really not good with sensitive skin or thicker hairs.

  49. Or what you're doing with the OS by phorm · · Score: 1

    Software that's single-threaded, no it doesn't benefit from more cores

    But - to an extent - running multiple single-threaded applications does. You're still bound by I/O, but it lets you do things like have something ripping a CD/DVD or doing a/v encoding running the background while you're still able to play a game online. In most cases add an Antivirus to the mix and it's quite often sucking up a good portion of a core when you're hitting a lot of files (again, also I/O, but SSD's help)

    Most people wouldn't multi-task enough to see the advantage of 8 cores, but they used to naysay multi-core as well. Go back to a high-Mhz single-core machine and tell me it's not painful.

  50. Quad ok, but 8 is just dumb.

    --
    I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
  51. 9 Pregnant Women by srobert · · Score: 1

    8 lawnmower engines Ferrari
    But is it still true that 9 pregnant women can produce a baby in only a month?

    1. Re:9 Pregnant Women by drcheap · · Score: 1

      8 lawnmower engines Ferrari But is it still true that 9 pregnant women can produce a baby in only a month?

      If they all happen to be working in a genetics lab on a cloning project, it's entirely possible.

  52. $ ps aux | wc -l by pscottdv · · Score: 1

    251

    --

    this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    1. Re:$ ps aux | wc -l by Urza9814 · · Score: 1

      ...on your *phone*? Because if not, that's irrelevant. Like talking about how fast your Ferrari goes to people discussing the best budget car...

    2. Re:$ ps aux | wc -l by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      Parent to my comment referred to PCs.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

  53. Dumb? Reminds me ... by yusing · · Score: 1

    I was instantly reminded of Steve Jobs saying that 7-inch tablets were dumb.

    Then I was reminded of an education conference I attended long ago and said that lots of PCs could be connected together and work on the same problem. The University's CS prof just blinked like he'd never heard anything so wacky.

    Oh yeah, and I also remember IBM laughing at how cute PC's were. A year or two before they started sweating blood.

    --

    "You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson

    1. Re:Dumb? Reminds me ... by jittles · · Score: 1

      I was instantly reminded of Steve Jobs saying that 7-inch tablets were dumb.

      Then I was reminded of an education conference I attended long ago and said that lots of PCs could be connected together and work on the same problem. The University's CS prof just blinked like he'd never heard anything so wacky.

      Oh yeah, and I also remember IBM laughing at how cute PC's were. A year or two before they started sweating blood.

      He may not mean dumb as in, this will never be useful. He may just mean that now is not the time for 8 core mobile chips. I would tend to agree. I have a 4 core machine in my desktop and the only time I use all those cores are 1) compiling code or 2) transcoding video. Very rarely do I use anywhere near all the processing power this thing contains. And I doubt that I use most of the cores on my 4 core telephone, either.

  54. Multicore by wolfguru · · Score: 1

    There's a fundamental perception that Qualcomm is missing; Multicore processors are not x times as good at doing a task, unless that task can be threaded to multiple components, but most business and consumer computing devices at this point ar not doing one thing at a time. As long as the OS has the capability of dropping a task into a memory space and assigning that to a processor, the muti-core processors will always offer a benefit to the user with more than one thing at a time going on (which includes the OS itself, and all of the myriad of drivers, checkers, updaters and such we have running in the background while we do the "oe thing" on our desktop.

  55. ... and other logical fallacies by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    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,

    You're right, it doesn't make sense. But then who, if anyone, is making such claims? Or did you, perhaps, invent those claims just so you could knock them down?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:... and other logical fallacies by eyenot · · Score: 1

      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,

      You're right, it doesn't make sense. But then who, if anyone, is making such claims? Or did you, perhaps, invent those claims

      You can't just take one thing you're saying, and compare it to what somebody else is saying, and say they're wrong but you're right using entirely different words. Words don't have intrinsic value so you can't prove that you proved the other person wrong. Or are we all just expected to sit here and drool down our chins, and nod anxiously, while you two duke it out?

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  56. Screw cores... by FrankenPC · · Score: 1

    I want more memory and IO bandwidth. I'm sick to death of manufacturers thinking 32GB is a LOT of storage. It isn't. 128Gb would be a LOT. ANOTHER THING...Buy a REAL WiFi chipset and antenna. Lame reception is no longer acceptable.

  57. Meanwhile... by mynis01 · · Score: 1

    Intel is planning to put out a 48-core mobile CPU in less than a decade ( http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139267-intels-48-core-supercomputing-smartphone-cpu-is-less-than-a-decade-away ), with the main benefit being improved energy efficiency. That being said, it may be a smart short-term business move for Qualcom to not pursue 8 core chips in the meantime, and calling everyone else stupid is a convenient way to justify that to stockholders. Myself, I would love to have excessively powerful mobile devices that far exceed the needs of the average consumer. I currently lug around a gargantuan Lenovo w530 which, for the majority of its use, is docked and closed. If I could just dock a phone with workstation-grade hardware in it, that would be much more convenient for me.

  58. Yes dumb... by niftymitch · · Score: 1
    Yes eight is likely very dumb.

    The most common internal bus designs are simple and ill suited to large SMP. And eight 1GHz engines is large from an OS and application point of view.

    That being said an improved system architecture could change the rules. Current RAM and ROM bandwidth is over taxed but graphic devices may provide a model for how to improve this tangle. Nothing less than a full data path redesign including ECC analysis is going to allow large core counts to play well. The data path redesign may trigger OS and application redesign.

    The results of eight+ core designs will tell us more when we get them in a lot of hands.

    --
    Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
  59. Not so dumb? by eyenot · · Score: 1

    Numerous commentators here have successfully pointed out in numerous ways that there's nothing inherently "dumb" with producing eight-core machines.

    Among the mentioned:

    * Numerous VMs working together to perform complex network tasks

    * Eight lawnmowers getting eight times as much grass cut in the same time -- not competing in car races

    I think what's obvious is that the comment made by Qualcomm may have been silly and perhaps even meant to be childish.

    Are we really to believe that they held a meeting, shared lunch, ate yogurt, called it a day, relaxed their ties and blouses and said:

    "So, after all's said and done, let's just tell Taiwan that eight cores are TOOOOPIIITTTHHH! BUH HUH DUH!!!"

    The concept is so utterly ridiculous I have to wonder what the perceived "angle" is, or what possible advantage could be gained by the comment.

    Will the average Wal-Mart and Best Buy shoppers somehow get wind of these comments and make well-informed decisions to go with cell phones and computers containing Qualcomm architecture?

    "Yo honey don't buy the faggy brand that's all stupid. We like money! Buy the one that's made by the sexy people that call the other people stupid. Stupid, thtupid people!" *spit & drool while talking, etc.*

    Will there be some contingency of "nerds" that reads the comments and just latches on with teeth-bared frenzy, bits and clings tenaciously to Chandrasekher's buttocks, frothing at the mouth and screaming (between clenched teeth full of buttock meat), "FFRRKKK MEDIATEK! FRK UUU! HRRRGGGHHH," eventually to develope a symbiotic parasitic relationship with Chandrasekher and become an extension of his buttocks (perhaps to one day be meat between the rabid teeth of some other nerd?)

    That also seems highly unlikely. Even a quick perusal of the comments here at Slashdot reveals not only do numerous people conclude that Chandrasekher made asinine statements, but also that those who agree with Chandrasekher are putting thought behind their decisions and also don't resemble lampreys.

    But anybody could have predicted that the more mindless masses would never be exposed to Chandrasekher's words and also that those who are exposed will put well-informed thought behind their interpretations of his statements.

    Well, "anyone", but possibly except for Chandrasekher.

    Hmm... could Chandrasekher just be ... *gulp* ... TOOPID?

    --
    "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  60. Here's a 5 core lawnmore by jshipp · · Score: 1
  61. Re:qualcomm is not right by guruevi · · Score: 1

    Well, the Pi can give you a 1GHz CPU with dual-core GPU, Ethernet, USB and 512MB RAM for $25 at 3.5W. There is just not a budget (yet) for what you're asking and probably by the time it is, you'd be saying "quad core and 4GB RAM? I want the power. So a 16 core with 32GB RAM using just 1W of power...".

    The biggest cost of hardware these days sits in manufacturing and transportation costs and sometimes licensing, not component costs (the component costs of the Pi are probably ~$5)

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  62. Re:qualcomm is not right by Raenex · · Score: 1

    It is the fallacy behind the Pi. I have 4 of them and use them for everything.

    Like what?

  63. OpenCL by DrYak · · Score: 1

    If the game industry ever moves from putting most of their effort in graphics, graphics, and more graphics, I see no reason why extra cores couldn't be used on improving AI and physics experiences.

    The reason? Because most of the physics boils down on doing the same kind of operation over a big collection of number. i.e.: something a which GPU are already excelling.
    You're going to gain much more from OpenCL acceleration than from multi cores.

    The only reason it's not done this way yet, is repeatability. If your going to have any gameplay impacting physics (destructible/modifiable environment, for example, instead of just some eye-candy death animation or explosions) and you do multi-player, you need that all player have the same gameplay-impacting result of physics (if one player blows a hole in a brick wall, you need the same shape of hole for each other of the player who might want to go through).
    You just can't have the server keep track of every single particle of the explosion leading to the whole. So the server can't synchronise it across player.
    So each player's game client has to run its own simulation, and all simulation have to arrive at the same end-result to avoid artifacts (other player seem to walk through walls and obstacles because in their simulation, the terrain-destruction-simulation that opened the way went differently).
    So for now, they are done on CPU, becuase CPUs are currently more predictable down to the rounding errors.
    But this situation is starting to get better (thanks to OpenCL, among other).

    In the short term, CPU are desirable because of more predictible and reproducible floating-point behaviour. Multi-core helps going faster.

    In the long term, GPU are going to be more desirable, because their better at number crunching, specifically at the "crunch a zillion of numbers, all in the exact same way" kind of number crunching.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  64. Give it time by Cobonobo · · Score: 1

    I agree that that many cores in a modern phone would be a completely wasteful drain on resources, but the way smartphones usage is being changed will be what shapes the future of processors, not what a company thinks. Take, for example, the Ubuntu Edge. Whether or not this machine ever comes to the public, the idea behind it is one that has become commonplace: a phone that can be used as a desktop computer. Now, when it comes to desktop computing, I prefer to use a minumum of 4 cores (I'm a video editor, so the power to run multiple high-resource programs is paramount), meaning that if I were to one day want to try using a phone/desktop hybrid, I would sure as hell want more cores. But even from the point of view of the average smartphone/tablet user, applications are becoming more advanced and resource intensive; games demand higher power GPUs and more RAM than ever before. As this trend continues, as it inevitably will (it is the wont of technology, after all), we shall see Qualcomm eat humble pie.

  65. Wider instead of taller CPUs: last resort by Intel by lpq · · Score: 1

    He makes a valid point, but misses the direction and point of the 8 cores
    (though it's up to 10-12 now, or 100 in a non-x86 compat 1Ghz Intel proc).

    Intel hit the wall on processor development when it came to *speed* (lets call that *height*) - the pinnacle of that was in the Pentium IV days when things were in the 4GHz range and trying to climb. Unfortunately, with the materials and processes available to Intel at the time (and still, today, though occasional research rumor indicate possibilities for that to change), too much heat was generated in 1 small place to make further increases practical w/o more elaborate kinds of cooling that would become more expensive and take more space.

    So Intel went *Wider*.... it was a way of maintaining profit margin on high end -- they could sell to providers and position processors to "Cloud providers", thus enabling the old-regime of large-central computing resources to reawaken -- the days of the personal computer look shaky at best.

    Combined with relative cost to people, and their absolute cost, people will *likely*, less be able to afford PC(Personal Computers) -- portables/handheld that let you tap into a cloud are the growing market, where you also, have no privacy -- as the US government points out --

    As soon as your data is moved to a cloud, you lose all constitutional protections under their current claims to power (the people need to get pissed enough to take that back through whatever mean (with box being
    a first choice on that list [ballot])).

    Meanwhile Intel can keep up their profits (for a little while -- a retreat to the high end has always been the start of the end for a corporation) as they go to fatter, 'wider' processors that will have to be positioned to providers -- as they will be the only ones that can make full use of them (as scores-thousands of users login to their own 'virtual machine' in the cloud)....

  66. let there be lawn mowers that blow your mind by audstanley · · Score: 1

    Is a 130mph good enough for ya: Http://www.wimp.com/themower

  67. In context, these are high-performance. by yakovlev · · Score: 1

    In the context of phones, the MediaTek has all high-performance cores. Not high performance by desktop standards, but relatively high performance. To be clearer: In the context of general-purpose consumer computing (which includes phone CPUs) there is currently little advantage to having more than 4 cores that have essentially the same power and performance characteristics.

    The advantage of big.LITTLE is that you pair a set of high-performance/high-power CPUs with a set of low-performance/low-power CPUs, and in theory get the best of both worlds. It's not clear if this is true in practice, unfortunately.

  68. Didn't Apple say the same thing about 4" LCD+2cpus by Cobalt2112 · · Score: 1

    Hey, Didn't Apple also say the same thing about "people not wanting bigger phone displays" until THEY come out with a bigger display. Same for multi-core phone CPUs... They said that there was no need to have multiple CPUs until THEY come out with a dual-core handset, then nobody remembers their previous flip-flop. Similar to politicians and so called "Analysts"

  69. That, and 8 lawnmower cylinders DOES make a V8 by raymorris · · Score: 1

    That, and he's fundamentally wrong in that a V8 actually IS pretty much 8 single cylinder engines mated together. It's 8 intake runners feeding eight combustion chambers with eight intake valves and eight spark plugs pushing 8 pistons, followed by eight exhaust valves opening from the 8 exhaust cams on the cam shaft ...

    His argument is more akin to saying that V8 engines are a dumb idea that could never work, that what you need is bigger cylinders, not more of them. He's precisely wrong - cars from the most anemic to the fastest use a fairly small range of cylinder sizes, they just use more cylinders for more power - anywhere from two cylinders to twelve.

    Kawasaki lawn mower engines, for example, have two cylinders of 218cc each. Ferraris have twelve cylinders of 500cc each.