Intel Disses Android's Dual-core Support
Never mind quad-core, is questioning dual-core chips with Android.
Intel is relatively new to the smartphone game, with just a couple of Medfield devices available today. However, the company is making waves this week thanks to comments made by its General Manager of Mobile and Communications. According to Mike Bell, Android and multiple cores just don't mix. At least not at the moment.
The Inquirer cites Bell as saying Intel's own testing shows that multi-core implementations can actually run slower than single core solutions. What's more, it's not really clear how much of a benefit there is in turning the second core on because of the way 'the people' have not implemented their thread scheduling.
"A lot of stuff we are dealing with, thread scheduling and thread affinity, isn't there yet and on top of that, largely when the operating system goes to do a single task, a lot of other stuff stops. So as we move to multiple cores, we're actually putting a lot of investment into software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it."
Intel's Medfield chip is a single core mobile platform launching at a time when solutions like the quad-core Tegra 3 is well established in the market, not to mention dual-core solutions from the likes of Qualcomm, so Intel would have had plenty of multi-core options to test against Medfield. Unfortunately Bell didn't mention which multi-core chips tested poorly when compared to Intel's single core.
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The Inquirer cites Bell as saying Intel's own testing shows that multi-core implementations can actually run slower than single core solutions.
Notice that it states it "can" run slower. Not will run slower, or usually runs slower. This is not a strong statement, and can be taken with a grain of salt. For example I can confidently state that laptops "can" spontaneously explode, and Intel chips "can" arrive brand new and fail after 1 day.
I also don't think they are talking about actually running separate tasks, but single multi-threaded tasks, so you are still getting the benefits of multi-core when doing more than one thing at a time, such as listening to streaming media while surfing the web.
Even if the scheduler was optimized in Android, how many high priority threads are you realistically going to be throwing around?
With a limited power budget, I would much rather have a much more powerful single core.
If anything, I could see a low power 'Companion Core' being integrated into the package to handle background tasks and operations while sleeping.
Wasting the power/thermal budget in mobile devices on more, lower performing, cores has never made sense to me
I suspect Intel knows what they're talking about here. Anything more than dual-core is wasted on a smartphone and even dual-core's usefulness is debatable with the current state of schedulers (however I'm led to believe AOSP ROMs have better performance on multicore devices)
Nvidia did a whitepaper to prove that multicore chipsets make sense on mobile devices.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_papers/tegra-whitepaper-0911a.pdf
The real problem is that Android still isn't capable of optimizing the use of several cores, but that is very different from flatly saying the single core solutions are faster.
The Inquirer cites Bell as saying Intel's own testing shows that multi-core implementations can actually run slower than single core solutions.
Notice that it states it "can" run slower. Not will run slower, or usually runs slower. This is not a strong statement, and can be taken with a grain of salt. For example I can confidently state that laptops "can" spontaneously explode, and Intel chips "can" arrive brand new and fail after 1 day.
I also don't think they are talking about actually running separate tasks, but single multi-threaded tasks, so you are still getting the benefits of multi-core when doing more than one thing at a time, such as listening to streaming media while surfing the web.
Except that Medfield actually outperforms those dual-quad cores in a lot of real world tasks.
On a smart phone, what tasks are you firing off and then switching to another task and chugging right along??
Nothing. That's the point. Nearly everything you do on a smart phone is one task at a time. That's all the screen really allows for in its application. When you switch between applications, the previous App goes idle until you switch back to it.
Some Apps might have multiple threads.. IE the browser maybe.. Games, maybe. But typically, not much does.
Answer: multiple core.
So yeah if you don't have multithreat applications is a waste of money to put so much effort in building multicore CPU's, improving architecture an a few Mhz more should do the trick and bring more performance than dualcore or quadcore CPU's in a mobile enviroment.
There were benchmarks and shit a few years ago! So go educate yourself before trolling here, Troll!
LOL. The fact is that a benchmark is nice to look at, but it means shit when you compare it to actual UI performance (the number one complaint of smartphone users). Call me when there is a button-press benchmark and dual/quad core hardware wins. Otherwise GTFO.
Oh, yeah, and I guess you are running DOS! And you don't have 50 background processes running
Any good program would have at least two threads or you are going to have a sad panda.
I'd also like to add that the current MFLOPS performance of ARM designs suck! Were talking mid-90's performance levels (around ~50-200 MFLOPS currently). When ARM can match intel, or at least crank out 1 MFLOP per Mhz, then I'll be a little happier.
That's never going to happen. Ever.