Qualcomm Says Eight-Core Processors Are Dumb

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Qualcomm Says Eight-Core Processors Are Dumb

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 2, 2013 @05:01AM from the also-hates-eight-cylinder-engines-and-eight-year-olds dept.

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

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The Onion said it best by Nimey · 2013-08-02 05:03 · 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 · 2013-08-02 05:15 · 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.
  
  --
  "I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
2. Re:The Onion said it best by Dracos · 2013-08-02 05:39 · 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.
3. Re:The Onion said it best by HermMunster · 2013-08-02 05:43 · 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.
4. Re:The Onion said it best by GNious · 2013-08-02 05:50 · 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.
5. Re:The Onion said it best by Tridus · 2013-08-02 05:56 · 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
6. Re:The Onion said it best by lxs · 2013-08-02 05:57 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Not from where I'm posting. In fact...
  Please donate 0.005BTC to 1CqdRjs4fXT9R85WmwZUxJNLXQkQPa4knP to read the rest of this comment.
7. Re:The Onion said it best by operagost · 2013-08-02 06:02 · 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.
8. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 06:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You could be a man and grow a beard.
9. Re:The Onion said it best by Obfuscant · 2013-08-02 06:37 · 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?
10. Re:The Onion said it best by Larryish · 2013-08-02 06:45 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I use cheap disposable single-bladed razors.
  Use once, throw away.
  $1 for 10 of them.
11. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 06:57 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Your mom gave me a rash...
12. Re:The Onion said it best by CanHasDIY · 2013-08-02 06:58 · 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
13. Re:The Onion said it best by mcmonkey · 2013-08-02 07:02 · 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.
14. Re:The Onion said it best by chill · 2013-08-02 08:05 · 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.
15. Re:The Onion said it best by Hatta · 2013-08-02 08:43 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Well it *is* a parody of the news.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
16. Re:The Onion said it best by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 09:53 · 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.
17. Re:The Onion said it best by TeknoHog · 2013-08-02 23:46 · 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.
qualcomm is right by Xicor · 2013-08-02 05:06 · 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 · 2013-08-02 05:10 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  And I suppose 640k is enough for anybody, too?
  
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  !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
2. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · 2013-08-02 05:13 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The reason he gave was one step ahead of that: even if you get apps that can use all eight cores, it's going to be murder on battery life, and most of the cost will be wasted (because most apps won't be using all that core power still.)
  
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3. Re:qualcomm is right by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-02 05:20 · 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.
4. Re:qualcomm is right by MachineShedFred · 2013-08-02 05:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I would think that a highly multithreaded app combined with a highly parallel CPU would actually be more power efficient, as you're doing the same work in less clocks.
  Granted, all tasks cannot be highly multithreaded, but that particular street goes both ways.
  
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5. Re:qualcomm is right by Billly+Gates · 2013-08-02 05:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You're just missing vision. Imagine Ubuntu Phone on an 8 core processor, you could have it run virtual machines and seamlessly switch between Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, IOS... who doesn't want that?
  Plus you'd still have enough oomph to run a torrent server, a tor node or just use your phone to mine some bitcoins.
  And your phone will be out of battery life by the time you unplug it and show up to work
  
  --
  http://saveie6.com/
6. Re:qualcomm is right by Samantha+Wright · 2013-08-02 05:38 · 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!
7. Re:qualcomm is right by kimvette · 2013-08-02 05:49 · 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
8. Re:qualcomm is right by aaaaaaargh! · 2013-08-02 05:49 · 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.
9. Re:qualcomm is right by a1cypher · 2013-08-02 05:49 · 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.
10. Re:qualcomm is right by ls671 · 2013-08-02 06:01 · 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?
  
  --
  Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Not that I disagree... by Opportunist · 2013-08-02 05:08 · 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.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
VM by Taibhsear · 2013-08-02 05:09 · Score: 5, Funny

And my virtual machines say, "Shut your pie hole, Chandrasekher."
1. Re:VM by froggymana · 2013-08-02 05:37 · 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
2. Re:VM by mr_da3m0n · 2013-08-02 06:01 · 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.
Similar quote from Seymour Cray by Crash+McBang · 2013-08-02 05:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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Cores matter depending on the software by Todd+Knarr · 2013-08-02 05:22 · 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.
Re:8 cylinder by Sponge+Bath · 2013-08-02 05:23 · Score: 4, Funny

Add a scoop, spoiler, neon trim and a fart can on the exhaust. Mowed in sixty seconds.
Re:and 640K is all you will ever need. by jkonrath · 2013-08-02 05:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

It is if your software can only address 640K. You don't add 8 gigs of RAM to your 8088 PC.
Re:qualcomm is not right by HermMunster · 2013-08-02 05:46 · 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.
I'll say it by fyngyrz · 2013-08-02 06:03 · 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 · 2013-08-02 06:28 · 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.
  
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  retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
2. Re:I'll say it by CastrTroy · 2013-08-02 07:07 · 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 tlhIngan · 2013-08-02 07:39 · 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).
Power? by hawguy · 2013-08-02 06:10 · 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.
multithreaded sorts by fyngyrz · 2013-08-02 06:14 · 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.

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I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.