How many cores does a smartphone need?

[a5cent]

Glad you made this post. I don't really understand a lot of this stuff, but what I see is that devices like the Galaxy SIII, One X or the iPhone4S are capable what running games with 3D graphics that current WP7.5 devices can't (and they still have a decente bettery life).
So my questions is (and I'm really confused now, so sorry for my language) what the h*ll do we need to be able to run 3D games like those (or even better ones) on our future WP8 devices too?

What you need is the best possible GPU and games that can make full use of it. The Adreno 320 is the best GPU we can expect to get for WP8, so this is what you should be looking for. Likely, this will not be advertised, so you will need to look up the specifications of the Qualcomm SoC in the device you intend to buy.

 

[1jaxstate1]

As many as it can have,as long as it's being taken advantage of. Bring on the Quad core processors!

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

 

[X0LARIUM]

My only argument still is, what an Android dual core smartphone can do, a single core WP7 phone do easily, without the dual core.

But, don't get me wrong, a quad core is always welcome.

 

[a5cent]

As many as it can have,as long as it's being taken advantage of. Bring on the Quad core processors!

Hey 1jaxstate1! I don’t intend to offend, but I must ask if you read anything in this thread before posting? It seems to me you didn't, which is why I'll attempt a small recap:

For desktop and server CPUs it is common to find that, within a CPU generation/family, quad-core CPUs integrate about twice as many transistors as their dual-core counterparts. In the size, temperature and power constrained mobile space the opposite is true. Given similar power and transistor budgets, a single core of a dual-core CPU will often end up roughly twice as powerful as a single core of a quad-core CPU. As 99.9% of all smartphone apps can't make good use of more than two cores, almost all apps run better on dual core devices where they have access to two powerful cores instead of four weaker ones (while usually leaving two of those weaker cores completely idle). That is exactly what has happened with the galaxy SIII, where app performance is almost always better on the U.S. dual-core variant (multithreaded benchmarking applications usually being the exception).

This won’t change anytime soon. Read the entire thread for more.

My only argument still is, what an Android dual core smartphone can do, a single core WP7 phone do easily, without the dual core.

For most everyday apps I would agree. IE is the one major exception, where a dual-core CPU would have helped tremendously, even for WP7.x! For twitch type 3D games I would disagree.

But, don't get me wrong, a quad core is always welcome.

For the reasons I’ve tried to explain and recapped in my answer to 1jaxstate1 I would disagree.

I would say:
Give me the fastest two cores possible. If adding any core beyond the second necessitates compromises (either to computational efficiency or clock speed of any one core) then I’d rather hang with two cores. If I can get four cores without any of those compromises (which currently doesn’t seem possible), then I’ll happily embrace mobile quad-core SoC’s too ;-)

I have seen nothing suggesting that they will continue to release WP7.X devices outside of those that have already been announced. Nokia has suggested that they will continue to support their users with updates, but there hasn't been anything to suggest that 7.8 isn't the end of the road.

In addition to what I’ve already stated, a few rumours have been cropping up lately, which also support the claim that WP7.8 devices will be around, including new hardware releases, for quite a bit longer than many expected:

Nokia to launch 4-inch Lumia 610 successor with Windows Phone 7.8? | wpcentral | Windows Phone News, Forums, and Reviews

But yes, they are yet only rumors, so no proof yet.

 

[Winterfang]

As of right now 2. As the near future 4.

 

[a5cent]

As of right now 2. As the near future 4.

And is that opinion based on fantasies and fairy dust, or something more substantial?

 

[Winterfang]

And is that opinion based on fantasies and fairy dust, or something more substantial?

Most games and apps are made with Dual Core in mind, hence why the LTE Dual Core american devices like GS3 and One X raise above their Quad-Core counter pants. Very few apps actually take the advantage of Quad-Core yet but having a device with them will likely future proof your phone.

 

[a5cent]

Most games and apps are made with Dual Core in mind, hence why the LTE Dual Core american devices like GS3 and One X raise above their Quad-Core counter pants. Very few apps actually take the advantage of Quad-Core yet but having a device with them will likely future proof your phone.

Hey Winterfang, thank you for adding some substance to that response. Actually, the vast majority of apps use but a single core. A small minority use two and almost none use more than that. Interestingly, even the handful of android games that use more than two threads perform better on the qualcomm S4 dual-core platforms. I've already explained why... possibly not very well, but I can answer questions if asked. If you are interested you might want to read the entire thread.

 

[cursor system]

The post is fantastic. I really enjoy it.

 

[jfa1]

y unscientific answer is that is needs as many cores as it takes to run smoothly and not lag stutter or stall out doing whatever we are trying to do or our device. other than that ...

 

[astraith]

65 cores. Because WP8 can only have 64. Lol jk

 

[thebizz]

all this talk about quad core not having a benefit should pick up the gsm unlocked s3 and one x they both have been said to perform better than the more efficient s4. And the us s3 has double the ram, now I'm not going to say wp8 needs quad core but I'm not going to say it has no place. Oh and those who say that the quad core processor would be useless please remember that 4 cores will only be used when needed when not needed they go to sleep. Personally I don't want quad core I would rather have a dual core a15 chip

 

[a5cent]

pick up the gsm unlocked s3 and one x they both have been said to perform better than the more efficient s4.

Hmm... I suspect you are being hoodwinked by people who have no clue what they are talking about. At least the measurements made by Anandtech (one of the few tech websites with technical staff that actually understand what they are measuring) would dispute that statement:

HTC One X International (Tegra 3 quad-core) vs. HTC One S International (Snapdragon S4 dual-core)

Result: The dual-core beats the quad-core 5:1 (I have removed battery and GPU related measurements as we are only discussing the general purpose CPU cores here). Unfortunately, I have nothing better to offer you than these synthetic test results, but they are all we have at this point. Although the quad-core is left munching dust, it would have looked much worse had we compared performance using actual apps and games.

Another one:

Samsung Galaxy S3 International (Exynos 4412 quad-core) vs. HTC One S International (Snapdragon S4 dual-core)

Result: Here the dual-core wins by 4:2 (again, I have removed battery and GPU related measurements and included the BaseMark OS score which is missing in this listing but included here).

Again, if these were actual apps and games instead of synthetic benchmarks, the dual-core Snapdragon S4 would have utterly destroyed the quad-core competition. Of course, it is also possible to find devices where the manufacturer has paired their SoC's with terribly slow RAM, which will kill a device's performance no matter how good the CPU is, which is why I chose HTC's One S... HTC did a very decent job on this one.

And the us s3 has double the ram

Assuming you're testing process isn't totally screwed, whether you've got 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM should be totally irrelevant for these types of tests. Much more important are RAM bandwidth and latency.

now I'm not going to say wp8 needs quad core but I'm not going to say it has no place

This I agree with. WP needs the best possible hardware that is most efficient at running the games and apps we all use every day. I couldn't care less if that turns out to be a 1000-core or a 0.5 core CPU . At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, a dual-core CPU with the most powerful cores we can get represents the sweet spot (on average).

 

[brmiller1976]

The claim that "specs don't matter" was popular with Apple in the late PowerPC days, when Microsoft and Intel were talking about MHz and Apple insisted that 900 MHz Pentium IVs weren't faster than 350 MHz G4 chips.

We all know how that ended.

A software platform should have support for the fastest chips available. Someone will ALWAYS be willing to pay a premium (and differentiate a platform) by its hardware capabilities.

Saying "this is enough for you" doesn't work, long-term. Offering choice is what wins. That's the whole lesson of the Windows PC era, and I'm a little sad that people are forgetting it in the Windows Phone era.

 

[a5cent]

Microsoft and Intel were talking about MHz and Apple insisted that 900 MHz Pentium IVs weren't faster than 350 MHz G4 chips. We all know how that ended.

Well, the MHz race of yesteryear gave us the worst Intel x86 CPU's the industry ever saw (we had to wait for AMD to come along and prove how ridiculous the MHz marketing ploy was before things got better). Today we're witnessing the exact same nonsense, except now everyone is salivating over core count instead of MHz. On the other hand, Apple's claims back then were also just nonsense... nothing new really.

Saying "this is enough for you" doesn't work, long-term. Offering choice is what wins. That's the whole lesson of the Windows PC era, and I'm a little sad that people are forgetting it in the Windows Phone era.

Assuming you are referring to my posts (I could be wrong), all I can say is that you have completely misunderstood the statements I've made here so far and seem uninterested in explanations or evidence (or you don't understand them, which would be my fault. I'm certainly not the best teacher in the world).

In fact, I want the fastest performing hardware I can possibly get, just like the next guy. I don't care how we get there and better performance is always welcome... there is no "enough"!

All I'm saying is that focusing exclusively on core count is not the way to get there, while also trying to explain why (apparently unsuccessfully)

Oh yeah... and CPU specs (the kind used today to sell devices) really don't matter... actual, real, measurable performance that is fully exploited by software does!

 

[Gungzwei]

I would express my opinion on the matter, but I don't want to hear another "mom lecture" from a5cent.

"Dangit, kids! I told you to be happy with 2 processors!"

 

[Simon Tupper]

Dual cores are just fine, more cores are just ruining battery life (I don't know for sure, but I've read that a few times)

 

[dreester]

At this moment we simply don't know how WP8 will perform on the S4 dual-cores because the phones aren't released yet.
But based on this video it's safe to say that NT kernel runs pretty smooth:
[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1oMa3ZJt5M[/YT]

Video description
A comparison of two identical prototype phones. The phone on the left is running the Windows CE kernel, the same OS kernel used in Windows Phone 7. The phone on the left is running the Windows NT kernel, the same OS kernel used in Windows Phone 8.

Dubbed "Experiment 19", the prototype system on the right proved that the Windows NT system could achieve better performance than Windows CE on identical hardware. The system was first demonstrated at MSR TechFest 2009. Filmed in 2009, this demonstration proved for the first time that Microsoft could use the same core windows components for both PCs and phones.

 

[Reflexx]

Specs lie.

I think the main point being expressed by a5cent is that if a person wants the most computational power for the tasks that phones will be performing, then we can't look at core count.

When you rely on things like core count, then you are being fooled by the spec sheet. You've been fooled by marketing.

 

[a5cent]

I would express my opinion on the matter, but I don't want to hear another "mom lecture" from a5cent.

"Dangit, kids! I told you to be happy with 2 processors!"

This thread never was about a certain number of cores. Like Winning Guy said, what I've tried to explain is why performance doesn't directly scale with core count. This is not an opinion, but a fact you can find many references to on the internet (although you will need to feel comfortable reading very technical and scientific material). As I've previously stated, you might want to google Amdahl's law.

What I've attempted to do here is offer a simpler explanation (still definitely not simple though), as to why core count isn't the be-all-end-all to CPU performance. I hoped this would be appreciated, particularly because WP devices never were the ones to chase specs in the way android devices do. I didn't just want to state: "the dual-core CPU's in our WP8 devices are the most effective/powerful CPU's we can currently get (including any available quad-core CPU)". I also wanted to explain why.

I'm sorry if my writing style was too intense. However, I'm sure you would agree that it is frustrating to have words put in your mouth (like "I told you to be happy with 2 processors!"), which Gungzwei wasn't the first to do. Particularly after putting a lot of effort into trying to be clear and precise.

I don't understand why my statements are being misinterpreted to such a degree. They don't seem difficult to me. I'm guessing people are commenting here without having read the entire thread, but who knows? This thread differs somewhat from others, as it doesn't lend itself well to just jumping into the discussion, without having read it from the beginning.

At least on a forum like this, I value truth over harmony. I hope most of you agree. But I am a reasonable guy and I'm very open to constructive criticism if anyone has such to offer.