Qualcomm: Mobile Processor Core Wars are Pointless
Samsung recently announced world's first eight-core mobile processor.
With quad-core smartphones now becoming more common, Qualcomm has stressed that mobile processor core wars in the smartphone industry are pointless and are not in the interest of consumers.
CEO Paul Jacobs was speaking during the Born Mobile presentation in China when he pointed out that Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa eight-core mobile chip simply utilizes a meaningless number for a publicity stunt.
He added that, when considering energy and thermal factors, the more cores a mobile manufacturer adds into their devices, the more challenging it becomes to manage them.
The executive stressed that the core wars will die down in the future. Instead, he believes the focus should be migrating towards real advantages for consumers such as smooth interface performance and faster downloads.
One of the predominant goals of mobile CPU advancements is preserving battery life while also maintaining performance levels. Samsung is doing exactly that with its eight-core processor through the utilization of big.LTTLE architecture.
Time will tell which architecture philosophy will come out on top.
UPDATE: Our story source, Unwired View, has updated with the following: "Qualcomm contacted us to point out that Paul Jacobs’ comments were taken out of context (having something translated from English to Chinese and then back to English again can do that, no doubt). Per Qualcomm, Jacobs did not use the words “misleading” or “publicity stunt” with relation to Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa processor. Furthermore, the words “publicity stunt” were not used at all. Qualcomm’s CEO did refer to the whole general focus on the number of cores in the mobile CPU space as “misleading”, though."
Also, the reason they are encountering problems with battery life and temperatures is because technology is made from outdated/inefficient materials and methods of production.
Plus, we aren't constructing technology to reflect the BEST of what is possible and in line with latest scientific knowledge, but instead, companies focus on what's monetarily viable (cost effective/cheap).
They don't care about technical efficiency, they care about COST EFFICIENCY.
Realistically, smartphones could be orders of magnitude more powerful than the best supercomputers and consume ridiculously small amounts of power, and in a tiny form factor.
But good luck seeing that in capitalistic oriented environment anytime soon.
Computers will be the same way. Intel showed off silcone with 80 core per CPU dies on it a few years ago.
The proof is also in the pudding......... More cores at lower power per core has generated CPU's that use less over all power than the previous 2 core or single core CPU.
I will be more than happy to use my 64 or 128 core mobile phone while you use your java based half core mobile phone.
This is absurd. Even a GS3 will get bogged down (US Dual Core version) if you are running 2-3 apps at once and try to open a 1080p video (which it has to down scale). That problem won't happen with 4 cores, or the affect of the slow down will be lessened by the extra 2 cores.
Most of that problem is Android, and it's underlying inefficiencies. Android as an OS is a real resource hog. Not to mention Dalvic. Makes it somewhat easier to develop apps for a wide variety of SOC's. At a big speed cost.
clueless much?
Got to give Samsung props for trying the first big.LITTLE implementation. It could backfire but they have dual/quad core designs to fall back on. They have the manufacturing advantage over Qualcomm so they can take that risk.
The main drawbacks on the S4, being dual core, is that in HTC Sense image data can't be offloaded onto the extra 2 cores, so that some images don't load in the interface until I'm fully in that area. For example, when in the application list in my launcher, if I drag from "All" to "Frequent", I don't see any Icons in the "Frequent" area, just a grey screen that says "Frequent" until I let go. No preview for me, since I'm dual core. Similarly, I get no image preview when in my Contact list, moving from, say, Groups to People..... And, a another minor negative, since the background can't be offloaded, Live Backgrounds are more likely to cause interface lag, or even cause minor breaks in sound when listening to music. As the background ends up loading one of the 2 cores, it causes the sound to break for a split second, and hence the hickup. Doesn't happen on the quad core.
Is this a big deal? Nope. Would I rather have the same phone with a quad core in it? Absolutely.
Qualcomm certainly wouldn't be saying anything negative about more cores, if they weren't behind. They're making Quad Core chips too. I bet their stance on the matter changes soon, when their quad core Krait chip is found in phones in larger markets. Then suddenly it'll be "Check out how amazing our quad core SOC is, and how much better it performs than dual core chips"
I do high performance multithreaded programming, and I firmly believe that more than 4 cores is great. However, there's definitely diminishing returns after 4 cores for trying to speed up a single process that requires a lot of concurrency, unlike most server applications that don't require a lot of concurrency between threads/processes. However, having 6 or 8 cores leaves plenty of CPU power for the OS and to do something else while you wait.
However, 4 cores (including the big.LITTLE Exynos 5) are probably the sweet-spot for a phone/tablet CPU. Call it excessive when there's a 16 core big.LITTLE.
Um, how? The best supercomputers can process petaflops right now.
And if you got a petaflop of processing power out of a tiny phone, imagine what s supercomputer would do with the same tech.
Also, Zak, FFS, it's a 4+4 core, stop calling it an 8-core.
I'm not sure how/why your post is being up-rated. We live in a material world. Where supercomputers are concerned money is not an issue for these companies. If something existed that could be feasibly produced and perform as you've described it would've already been done. The technological and economical aspects of these challenges function in one world, the real world.
On topic, phones will continue to duke it out in terms of performance just like PCs have since the mid 90s when benchmarking performance became important. Performance will continue to be important and better performance will cost more to put in your pocket than lower performing parts of the same generation hardware. We can never have enough peformance and this is where Qualcomm is just wrong. Until I can run a super-computer equivalent out of my pocket, have it capable of installing a windows virtual machine, run desktop monitor, keyboard and audio when docked (meaning: simply rested against a charge pad on my desk) I will not be satisfied.
I'm waiting for the day they start plugging us into the matrix directly.
The "long loads to threads" idea is actually an old one. Basically, there's a loop in a lot of OSes. Part of that loop deals with drawing the window/view/whatever it's called. If that function doesn't get called, your program looks frozen, even though it could be working just fine.