No Quad-Core WP8 This Fall

[GoodThings2Life]

In the words of Spock, "I do not dispute it. I merely state that it's wrong."

You can argue tech specs all day long (and I've been doing IT work 20 years) but it doesn't change the fact that it's not a relevant spec yet... desktop or mobile.

 

[VagrantWade]

It also reminds me of all the people who wanted the 64 bit AMD processors when they first hit. And then never used a 64 bit processor with it...

 

[a5cent]

In the words of Spock, "I do not dispute it. I merely state that it's wrong."

You can argue tech specs all day long (and I've been doing IT work 20 years) but it doesn't change the fact that it's not a relevant spec yet... desktop or mobile.

Hmm.. agree.. but I wasn't trying to argue that it is a relevant spec (I'd probably be the last person on this site to do that). I was trying to explain why you will never see mobile SoC's reaching the price point of desktop CPUs (at least for the foreseeable future).

 

[power5]

It reminds me of my co-worker who opted for a slower clock speed i7 over an ivy bridge i5 because the i7 has hyperthreading.

He has yet to use any application that utilizes hyperthreading.

A silly world we live in.

SB clocks much better than IB. Why I bought a 2600k over a IB of the same clock. Well that and Microcenter had 2600k for $199 + $50 off Z77 mobo. No brainer for me. Slapped on a cheap water cooler and I am now at 4.8ghz for the fun of it. Try to hit 4.8 on that i5 IB chip you think your co-worker should have gotten. Not saying thats why he got it, but the stock clock speed difference is not noticeable by anyone not running a synthetic benchmark. So, why not have the hyperthreading for cheaper than the "newer" IB i5?

Hasn't anybody else noticed that quad-core CPU's aren't even that common on desktops yet? Just because you see 4 processors (thanks, hyperthreading), we're still dominantly dual-core.

Why, then, do we obsess over quad-core phones? Why do we expect that a quad-core phone should somehow be cheaper than a quad-core desktop system? It's ludicrous.

I'm not against it, I'm a tech guy for crying out loud I WANT it, but I'm realistic too.

RISC vs CISC is also a reason for the cheaper prices. Simpler architecture means less transistors. Less stuff equal less cost.
Same reason ARM is moving to multi core is the same reason x86 architecture moved to multiple cores. It was easier to get more performance from more cores than from clocking the CPUs to light speed. Athlon 64 X2 practically destroyed the P4EE clocked at 3.73ghz.

 

[power5]

a5cent is right and his thread is spot on, first of all look how well WP runs on a lumia 710, much better than a lot of mid range droid devices with better specs - that should make you think.

I have a intel i3930K 6 cores 12 threads and 95% of the software doesn't or can't utilise all six cores effectively, the amount of time I watch task manager and curse all 12 threads sitting there chugging away using 8% of each thread.
Sometimes the difference between that and my i5 cpu is negligible.

There is no point of a quad core cpu until software developers are ready to use it, they aren't on android yet, and they aren't on WP8 - Id swap quad core cpu for optimised dual core OS and better battery life anyday of the week
Like I said, look at the 710, it doesn't feel laggy at all - the proof is in the pudding

All OS are more optimized than people think. Android OS works just fine on bottom end hardware. But, when you start adding widgets and apps that do background work you kill it. Now in that respect its quite obvious that WP is better written than android. But if a killer app was designed to run on as many cores as possible you would see an immediate rush of people clamoring for a quad core phone.

Take your 6 core and transcode a video. Or, do a rendering in strata, or play around with a 500mb image in photoshop. Then you will love your 12 HT cores. If you do not do any of that stuff at home, then you wasted your money on your shiny new chip. Upgrading from SB to IB is pretty much a waste for gaming and surfing but I am sure you realize that.

Watching the Nokia phone app that edits video and pictures in real time, that could very very easily work faster with a quad core. So look at the software that Nokia is making with DC, what do you think they could do with a hex core ARM?

 

[freestaterocker]

From what I understand, no current quad core processors have onboard LTE, so the LTE modem would have to be added separately. These separate LTE modems (such as the ones used in first generation LTE Android phones) use more battery power. Thus, the dual core/LTE chipsets are a power saving measure. At least that's what I've heard.

The yet-unreleased S4 Pro does. But they're still working out power-management to make it functional for phones.

 

[SnailUK]

But if a killer app was designed to run on as many cores as possible you would see an immediate rush of people clamoring for a quad core phone.

But number of cores is just like saying number of horsepower on a car is the only measure of performance.

The iPhone 5 is "only" a 1.3ghz dual core, yet runs like an absolute rocket, due to using the right components, and spending the time to get the hardware optimised correctly.

or put simply

Cores != performance

 

[power5]

Rocket that boots slower than a S3.

iPhone 5 vs Galaxy S3 boot up time - SiNfuL iPhone

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs. Apple iPhone 4S Boot Up Test 2012 High End Smartphones! - YouTube

 

[AngryNil]

Rocket that boots slower than a S3.

Boot time is quite frankly one of the most awful "measures" of performance.

 

[power5]

Not sure why a synthetic benchmark is so much better than a real life benchmark. I hope you know that companies like Nvidia have released drivers SPECIFICALLY for doing better in synthetic benchmarks. So, would that be a better measure? Everyone uses 3dmark to test PC GPU performance. Its a set program that any company could deliver perfect drivers for, and they do. So, you will take that result as gospel, but not a real time boot test?

 

[freestaterocker]

Rocket that boots slower than a S3.

iPhone 5 vs Galaxy S3 boot up time - SiNfuL iPhone

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs. Apple iPhone 4S Boot Up Test 2012 High End Smartphones! - YouTube

And my 1ghz single core HD7 with mango boots faster than an S3...

 

[power5]

Awesome post the video. Would love to see that.

But, we all know that a wp7 device has no chance of running wp8.

 

[sentimentGX4]

I appreciate your insight along with your always staunch opposition to Quad-Core phones.
In 2-3 years when Quad-Core Mobile Processors (Smartphones) are widely prevalent, I expect you to lead the charge against Hexacore devices of the same type. Because surely we can't have our mobile computing devices breaking boundaries, getting smaller, or becomming more energy efficient.

1912 Forever!! That is all.

That's a misguided thing to say. Snapdragon S4 dual cores are currently just as fast as ARM Cortex A9 Quad Cores, if not faster in most regards.

Demanding Tegra 3 quad cores over Snaodragon S4 is like asking for 1912 as well. Not only because the Tegra 3 isn't faster than Snapdragon S4 but because the Tegra 3 is built around older technology.

I really wish spec junkies would inform themselves better. There is nothing particularly desirable about the current crop of quad core mobile processors.

 

[CSJr1]

That's a misguided thing to say. Snapdragon S4 dual cores are currently just as fast as ARM Cortex A9 Quad Cores, if not faster in most regards.

Demanding Tegra 3 quad cores over Snaodragon S4 is like asking for 1912 as well. Not only because the Tegra 3 isn't faster than Snapdragon S4 but because the Tegra 3 is built around older technology.

I really wish spec junkies would inform themselves better. There is nothing particularly desirable about the current crop of quad core mobile processors.

What part of breaking boundaries, getting smaller and more efficient did you not understand? If you did understand, why would you put up a Tegra 3 40 nm against an S4 28nm or heaven forbid a S4 Pro 28 nm?

What you fail to realize is that I, contrary to your opinion of "spec junkies", know that quad core is not useful NOW. But, stop living in the present or you may find you become one of those that stiffle innovation and developer drive due to the plethora of status quo. Sure, there is nothing the LG Optimus G can do now that any Dual core couldnt do. (Besides shoot lights out in benchmark tests thats not a useful application) But What If.. What if a WP8 Quad had native C++ code for video transcoding and fully used the Adreno 320? Could we hasten the end of the desktop? What if.. ..

 

[a5cent]

All OS are more optimized than people think.

Then I will state that some OS' are a lot less optimized than you think.

I can leap into a lengthy post pointing out hundreds of situations where Android devices lack any type of optimization (on most handsets), but I'm not sure that would be appreciated.

Instead, simply consider this: Any optimizations Google makes to Android must be hardware agnostic, as Google may not make any assumptions about what types of hardware manufacturers ultimately decide to slap together. That is why stock Android generally fails to exploit much beyond the general purpose CPU cores. That is why giving Android devices two general purpose CPU cores, instead of just one, results in such a huge performance gain.

It's not even just about optimized hardware utilization, but also about optimizing the OS for the types of use-cases it is expected to encounter most often. Android utterly fails in this department too. Honestly, that we even need something like "project butter" on a dual-core 1GHz platform, just to get smooth UI performance, is so utterly ridiculous it is not even funny. Anyone implying this is anything but unoptimized "slop" is simply... I don't know... pick your own word

Edit: Personally, I think it is fair to label Android as bloatware.

Watching the Nokia phone app that edits video and pictures in real time, that could very very easily work faster with a quad core. So look at the software that Nokia is making with DC, what do you think they could do with a hex core ARM?

That would be utterly inefficient. That is what SOC's have specialized media processing cores for. WP8 devices actually have seven cores, not just two, but if the OS is to make use of them, it needs to be able to rely on them existing, which Android can not do to the same degree (see this post for details).

But if a killer app was designed to run on as many cores as possible you would see an immediate rush of people clamoring for a quad core phone.

Yes, but only if no dual-core SoC exists, that is capable of running that thread-friendly app just as fast, with the added benefit of running those apps with two or less threads even faster. As I've explained multiple times, that is the situation we can expect to encounter in the smartphone space for the foreseeable future, because all smartphone SoC's are constrained to the same power and thermal restrictions no matter how many cores they have. Read my thread above for more info.

 

[cckgz4]

It also doesn't have a lightening dock connector. We are so behind in this smartphone game

 

[power5]

Then I will state that some OS' are a lot less optimized than you think.

I can leap into a lengthy post pointing out hundreds of situations where Android devices lack any type of optimization (on most handsets), but I'm not sure that would be appreciated.
(see this post for details).

Yes, but only if no dual-core SoC exists, that is capable of running that thread-friendly app just as fast, with the added benefit of running those apps with two or less threads even faster. As I've explained multiple times, that is the situation we can expect to encounter in the smartphone space for the foreseeable future, because all smartphone SoC's are constrained to the same power and thermal restrictions no matter how many cores they have. Read my thread above for more info.

I am not overly experienced with android but the very few times I have used it, once being a S3 in att, it was not laggy at all. Other times were on Droid?? devices from a couple years ago. None were probably rooted or running too advanced versions of droidOS either.


By more than DC I simply mean double what we have now on the chip, or triple for a hex core. So everything is doubled, not just 4 CPU cores. No way a faster clocked "DC" will outperform a slower "QC" if the app utilizes as many "cores" as it can use. So if it can only use the media processor then it will have double the amount in a QC than it does in a DC. I do not want a unbalanced quad with 4 CPU cores and forget the rest of the SoC architecture.

 

[a5cent]

By more than DC I simply mean double what we have now on the chip, or triple for a hex core. So everything is doubled, not just 4 CPU cores. <snipped> So if it can only use the media processor then it will have double the amount in a QC than it does in a DC. I do not want a unbalanced quad with 4 CPU cores and forget the rest of the SoC architecture.

Hey Power5, I understand what you are saying. It would be great if that was how things worked, but it isn't. For example, all the DSP's and all the media processors are pretty much exactly the same across all of Qualcomms Krait based SoC's, no matter how many cores any specific SoC has.

No way a faster clocked "DC" will outperform a slower "QC" if the app utilizes as many "cores" as it can use.

This is exactly the main error in judgment many people are making. It is understandable, but it is flat out wrong.

The main error people make, as always, is assuming all cores are equal, when they are anything but. It is entirely possible to have a quad-core and a dual-core CPU, both clocked at 1.5GHz, and each running the same, highly parallel app (which can use any number of cores), and end up with the dual-core performing much better. All this means is that an individual core in the dual-core CPU is doing much more work per clock than an individual core in the quad-core CPU. Simple as that.

This benchmark comparison is an example of precisely that. In it we see the dual-core MSM8260 (the same SoC coming to most WP8 devices) executing the multi-threaded linpack benchmark almost TWICE AS FAST as its quad-core competitor, even though the quad-core is running on ALL FOUR CORES in this test! According to your statement this should be impossible, but it is clearly happening, not just in theory.

I've hinted at the reasons why this won't really change much in the mobile space in my previous post (#20).

 

[cckgz4]

The first lte us quad core phone will be the one x+

 

[power5]

That is 2 different architectures. That is the same as people comparing performance per Clock speed of AMD vs Intel. Intel is always faster in this test. Their single threaded performance always destroys AMDs. So AMD has started putting 6 core chips against intel quads and have gotten much closer to intel performance. 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.

Edit, in x86, AMD needs 50% more cores than intel to compete and its at a lower price point as well. Compare that to the tegra vs snapdragon and tegra would need to be a 6 core to compete with DC snapdragon. That is how inferior tegra architecture is. The point is to get it to truly be an experiment to see if more cores are better than fewer cores. So this is easy in the x86 world on desktop. I can turn off as many cores as I want. If I have a 6 core intel I can turn on 4 and have a DC intel and show how much of an improvement the extra cores make in multi threaded tasks like renderings and transcoding. Its a huge difference and the more cores ALWAYS wins. Its just simple reasoning. An S4 Pro would run faster than a DC S4 in anything that can utilize unlimited core resources. I would hope no one disagrees with that.