a5cent
New member
I am not doubting that the S4 snapdragon DC is better than the tegra3 QC. But I will bet that the S4 pro is much faster than the S4 DC in that test. I thought I mentioned in this thread that architectures had to be the same, but that must have been the other thread talking about similar topic.
Yes, absolutely. Two different architectures. Obviously, I also agree that the 4c Krait will be faster than the 2c Krait, provided we get apps that actually know how to make use of those extra cores (a big "if"). It must be that way, since all the Krait cores are exactly the same. BUT! The 4c Kraits use twice the transistors and have almost twice the power envelope of the 2c Kraits. Qualcomm recommends against using the 4c Krait SoCs in smartphones for exactly that reason. It's also why none of the 4c Kraits come with built in radios... they're WiFi only, intended for use in tablets that can provide sufficiently large batteries to power them.
Of course, that won't stop manufacturers from trying to put them in a smartphone anyway (having four cores sells). And luckily, they will get away with it, for the obvious reason that those two extra cores will almost never get fired up and thus never draw power for any notable amount of time.
Assuming the purely hypothetical scenario, where all of us started installing web-servers or started doing CGI rendering on our smartphones, that house of cards would come tumbling down pretty fast and manufacturers know it. Obviously, manufacturers need a way out of that sticky situation should it ever crop up anywhere, and their solution is simple: add a "feature" allowing you to turn those two extra cores off completely. So, you get the bragging rights for having four cores, but only as long as you never find a way to actually use them, at which point you will be turning them off (unless you are happy with three to four hours of battery life per charge).
Despite all that, one good reason remains to get a 4c Krait based WP device, namely the Adreno 320 GPU that comes with it. It is far superior to the Adreno 225, but that is another topic entirely.
Of course, should we ever get smartphone batteries that are capable of driving a 4c Krait "on all cylinders" for any reasonable amount of time, then any CPU designer worth their salt will be able to take that same amount of transistors (as used by a 4c Krait) and invest them into a new 2c CPU design, a new CPU architecture if you will, that will easily keep up with the 4c Krait, with the added benefit of being much faster with apps that use two or less threads. That's simply a repeat of the situation I refereed to in my last post, but with the 4c Krait taking the place of the 4c Tegra3.
You understand what I'm getting at?
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