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Multi core phone CPUs
PencilBreath
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I was reading various articles/comments about the S3 in particular & they were saying that really quad core CPUs in phones are pretty pointless just now as no apps would be optimized to use them & the O/S itself doesn't even use them.
Are they just "future proofing" features then?
Are they just "future proofing" features then?
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And the point of PencilBreath's post was that this "divvying up" is not taking place, in a significantly beneficial manner anyway.
there is truth in that. a bit.
in theory a single process can run over more than one core but it needs to be specifically written to do that. and multithreading apps is hard, not a lot of app designers will do that. but some will, the advanced games and things all do.
even if the app you are running is not multithreaded itself it can max out one core and leave the other cores available for the other things going on. the system functions and all those other apps running in the background. and the app itself will be calling system functions.
multicore is a fudge. we have multicore processors because we can't build single core cpus fast enough.
but it's the only thing we have.
Bragging rights i guess.
when i moved from a single core PC to a dual core one i noticed a massive difference, when i moved from a dual core PC to a quad core PC i noticed no difference.
When i moved from a single core android phone to a dual core one i noticed no difference so i cant see a quad core one suddenly being amazing based just on the fact it is quad core.
Essentially you will have the normal quad cores and then a fifth slower core, so that when your not using the phone, i.e. in standby, everything switches to the 5 low power/slower one
This is not new, the Tegra 3 SoC can do this, as does the new Tegra 4 SoC.
At the moment a number of cores is just a gimmick, a pissing contest, IMO.
That's one of the reasons servers nowadays do that for when they are not in use.
That's only true if the architecture of the quad core chip is newer than that of the single core.
For example one core of a dual core A15 uses less power than one core of a quad core A9.
Apparently one or more cores should be low power consumption low performance, which is enough for background processing when phone is in standby. When more intensive tasks are running the other cores are used instead.
Fo shizzle.
If they are designed that way. In general though....
I thought modern cores park when not in use so is that not the same?
The last time i heard the term 'park' was in parking the head of a HDD :eek:.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Core+parking&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Perhaps it's just a windows feature.
I think you are getting confused, only threads can be parked not cores.
Although when idle CPUs don't consume much power any way.