TI: Dual-Core OMAP5 Faster Than Quad-Core Cortex A9

I just don't see why we need quad cores in phones. Maybe when they use less battery, but now dual cores are just fine and fast(as this proves).

Who does super intensive multitasking important stuff on their phone that needs a quad core anyways?

Hope this does not surprise anyone although this will be short term as new revs of quads come out. The only thing that is surprising here is that the performance was more than double for the dual core. Could that be partially due to a non-optimized application.

TI has a long history of really solid engineering.

Exactly....I agree completely. I would be surprised if 25% of the applications used more than 1 core on a mobile device and if they did use more than that we would probably have much less battery life.

OMAP5 won't be available in devices before Q4 2012. For now quad-core Cortex A9 based SOC's provide the best performance for mobile devices, and if implemented well (ie Tegra 3) it can do so while providing improved idle batter life.

Thats a very short sighted comment.. Its seems obvious to me that while smart phones and tablets are Nvidias current target they are pushing speed and cores so that along with Windows 8 ARM, they can become a player in the CPU biz and move into desktop / laptop space. Seeing as how Intel will likely never give them an x86 license this is about as good as it gets for them.

It's difficult to draw a direct comparison to dual-core devices, but at least with Tegra 3, battery life doesn't seem to be much of a concern. Aanadtech did a pretty thorough review of the Transformer Prime, and even under load battery life remains at least on par with dual core devices, all while improving avg performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5163 [...] 3-review/1

These are battery life updates that were published later:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5178 [...] ifi-issues
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5175 [...] followup/3

ARM better step up its game. I'm starting to lose hope in them, specially with there dismissing of Intel as competition.

If you're talking strictly about today, this year, 2012, I would completely agree with you. Here's why:
-Are applications even written to utilize more than 1 core?
-Do most users multi-task enough on their smartphones to justify a need for quad core? No
-Can Quad-core mobile phones be a useful thing when plugged into a docking station and basically used as a computer on its own? Yes. Are we there yet? No. The Atrix was released about a year ago, and there has been little competition for it. The majority of the people won't care until the iPhone allows this type of support, and Android users will catch on. I think the intent here, more or less is to make a phone powerful enough to "run Crysis" on your smartphone, anytime, anywhere, any docking station without having to carry around a laptop. Personally, I'd like to see that.
-Is battery life decent enough to run so many applications at once? Only on the Droid RAZR MAXX, but that's only a dual core
-Are screens actually big enough to spend enough time multi-tasking on them? No, but that may change if/when phones the size of the Galaxy Note become more popular. Steve Jobs hated larger sized phones, so I don't see something of that size coming to the iPhone, and again, most people won't catch onto that since it's not on the iPhone.
I do realize Android is now more widely used than the iPhone, now, but iPhone users seemingly always want to hop onto the next Apple trend. Android/Google users, not so much, or so it seems.

Now put OMAP 5 in the new TI calculators. I'm tired of 12MHZ 68000 chips in $200 calculators

i dont understand phones nowadays, its like lets put in quad cores and have huge screens so they are basically tables in your pocket (if you can even put them in your pocket), what are you trying to do play crysis on your phone? lmao.

was the benchmark even four-threaded?

Even if the applications are not optimized, quad core should still be useful if I want to listen to music, use GPS and other apps at the same time. As long as OS itself is optimized, things should still be fast, right?

OMAP 5 may have its advantages but I'm not sure why Qualcomm was mentioned in the second paragraph..

So what happens when you want to run 4 single thread only programs at once? If you want to stream an MP3 out to the stereo while using the GPS to navigate and be able to answer the phone, you need more power.

Nice, didn't notice that. But unfortunately it really doesn't surprise me. Tom's News article authors FTW!

There is a queing process that processors use to process multiple commands at once. That is how it is done. In some cases the operating system can dynamically set sim affinity to a specific core but the application is still single treaded and would not actually gain any performance benifit from the other cores. Windows 7 actually does some of that because the OS is multi-threaded but most of the applications are not. OSX also does this but most of the applications are also already multi-threaded which is in part why OSX multi-tasks so well. True multithreaded applications actually see a performance gain in terms of handling processor heavy tasks when the additional hardware is available.

That is nice however the article does not show that all 4 cores are being used under those testing conditions. It just shows video playback. Not saying that they are not being used, just highlighting the fact that it is not shown. The OS however is definitely multithreaded which is why there is a noticeable increase in smoothness and probably faster load times but again the OS does not put much load on the processor. It is the applications that will do it.

Give you an example, on my IPhone watching movies, talking on the phone, browsing the web, 5-7 hours battery life with no additional heat depending on how much of each I am doing. Yet I can only play Infinity Blade for 2 hours or less before my phone is out of power and it is noticeably warmer. The Application does not use power it uses hardware. Higher processor and GPU utilization, using multiple cores generates more heat and requires more power therefore a decrease in battery life under those conditions.

I technically agree with you, but I think your note about power v. hardware is splitting hairs. Additionally, I expect that streaming video and playing games on your phone, while not identical in stress, will becomparable in the amount of power they will pull. Multi-core/multi-threading, is about accomplishing tasks - getting a group of people to build a house rather than one. The amount of total efffort needed is supposed to be similar, but with multi-core/threading its dispursed to a number of individuals. When you're talking about streaming, it's a slightly different beast, because it operates partially on a set time, not simply as fast as it can go. You want to load an app, you want it to just be fast as possible. You watch a movie, you want it to just run smooth. So yes, a single or dual-core CPU can perform the same tasks as a quad-core, but if the task is optimized properly, the quad-core should be able to finish it faster. This becomes less evident if all you're doing is streaming content, beacause a 90-minute movie is still a 90-minute movie. Here it becomes a matter of whether or not the rest of the hardware (the graphics) can handle the vidoe at the resolution level.

This is just further proof that hardware is outstripping software particularly badly at the moment. Just take a look at the regularity at which new CPUs and GPUs are released. Hardware is advancing at a phenomenal rate. However, software makers are much slower in developing towards the capabilities of some of these newer hardawre capacities. We're pushing the eight-core boundary in personal desktops, and you've got 16-cores in server processors. If we assume that hardware advancement is not just about hollow bragging-rights, then software still being developed at the single-threaded or even dual-threaded level is a serious bottleneck on the advancement of computing.

Or we can just assume that there really is no need for all these multi-core processors.

Applications have the be written to use multiple cores period, they don't just come that way just because they are installed on a machine that has multiple cores. When you talking about a 90 minute movie, it is still a 90 minute movie. Having faster hardware does not change that or more cores does not make a 90 minute move playback faster. However the encoding software used to create the movie will finish faster as those applications are written to be multi-threaded and they can spread the work around as you mentioned. Resolution processing will occur on the core designated for use with a single threaded application. That is why if you look at the task manager you will see allot of tops uneven distribution of utilization across all cores in the system. If you have a Video applications running, you will see one core with higher utilization and the other cores sitting at almost idle.

I used to do allot with firewall performance testing where we did some tweaking of the applications affinity to the cores manually because of the way it distributed processing as flows went through the system. Properly configured we could do a 140Gbs of Firewall performance with 1500 byte packets with 10,000 new connections per second. Without the tweaks we where getting some 3 getting loaded up to 100% utilization while the other 9 cores where sitting at 50% or less.

Hardware advancements are not just about bragging rights. There is a market for the higher end parts, and servers and pro workstations regularly use applications that leverage the extra cores. But we are not talking about Pro Workstations or Servers, we are talking about Phones. A little different. Even the Games that we play on our computers are really just starting to take advantage of quad core processors. Supreme Commander was one of the first although it did a crappy job of it unless you used the Core balancer application.

My single core Incredible S with a custom ROM is faster than my girlfriends Sensation dual core with stock ROM; and mine gets better battery life with the brightness full blast than hers does on min brightness.

IMO dual core is the most anyone needs IF the software is optimized to utilize it.

soon we will have a mobile os platform, and the phone will be the power.

imagine a dock that you plug the phone into, and up comes a full widows looking os on a 1920x1080 screen, with a keyboard and mouse in front of you.

you take it out of the dock and pocket it, and there its now your phone again

you take it on a plane with a laptop body, plug it where the touch pad would be, and congrats, you now have a laptop...

power increases in phones are leading up to this kind of computer experience. most people will be happy with that set up... much like they are now with 600$ dell pos'es. tell someone they can get a desktop... or tell them they can get a phone, laptop, and desktop experiance all for about the same cost as the desktop, and what do you think they will get?

remember most people only check email, play a facebook game, and look at the internet... a smartphone/tablet can do that right now fairly well, and in some cases better than a desktop/laptop of similar price.




because they really arent. arm has a long line of apps built for it, and its what people expect from smartphones... and smartphone without the apps, will most likely never stand a chance. intel only really has a leg to stand on because of windows 8 comeing to the tablet and cellphone space.

the better tech doesn't always win. i would think people who read much about technology would understand that.

TI proves once again...quality or quantity. Quad core smartphones are a waste, waste of money and a waste of battery power.

..in the end the best tech DOES win.

The Ti CPU/SOC in the Nexus (4460) is absolute garbage. It's laggy AND sucks down battery juice like fat kid does cake.

I really hope they make SIGNIFICANT improvements on their next dual core; they need to.

Number of cores, clock speed doesn't matter architecture matters most. The typical example is the case of performance comparison of a Core i3 2100 vs AMD 6 core FX6100. Nvidia's Tegra 3 is a scrap in every sense.
The way they marketed seemed like Tegra 3 is something extraordinarily performing one. I always hates Nvidia's marketing strategy to fool its customers in a way that they are about to bring something unbelievably performing.

if the applications are not written to take advantage of all the cores it does not matter how many cores you have....it's a fact...just look at how it was when the 64bit and multi core cpus came out....at first they were useless, after the developers started to write code to take advantage of the hardware they really started to shine

Has anyone thought that the Tegra 3 might be using the Ninja Core, plus one core?

Since the ninja core cannot be powered on at the same time as any of it's 4 other cores, the question makes no sense.

Two things:
[*] It never said it was using the 4 cores, it could've just as easily have been using the Ninja Core, which would've contributed to the sluggishness.
[*] Look at the top comment in YT:

Few things I want to bring up.

If the dual core OMAP 5 is faster than the competing quad core, then why not take the CAD file for the OMAP 5, then select the 2 cores, and do a quick Ctrl + C, and a quick Ctrl + V?


Also, not many programs for mobile devices are able to use 4 threads (most programs are single threaded, with a select few being able to offload certain tasks to the additional cores)

The main area where 4 cores helps with is gaming, and multitasking (though multitasking is harder to do on a device with 512MB or 1GB of RAM)

While quad core can be great, currently the applications have not caught up since most devices are single core (with very few being dual core), and now quad core has come out.

SO it is not that the CPU is overall faster, it just means that it has 2 fast cores, instead of 4 slower cores that total up to higher overall performance when all 4 cores get to work together on a single task.

The main reason for it is power efficiency, with many core technologies, power usage grows faster than performance. (eg you may see a single core technology run at 95 watts, then a higher end version that uses 125 watts but only performs a little bit faster, so instead of delving into rapid growth in power consumption for small performance increases on a single core, you take the more efficient cores and keep them at the same speed and just add more of them).

dual cores for phone. quad cores for tablet. It make more sense. It is kinda scary to walk around with really powerful battery in your jean pocket. Hopefully it won't explode.

Well the same situation as with desktop... Is dual core enough compared to hexacore in desktop... Allmost allways... Will the situation be the same in few years to come... maybe not if everything goes as we hope...
The best part of multi core is the ability to scale up and down in power and power usage by using one, two, three, four, five... cores when needed and putting all the rest in deep sleep, or completely shut them down. The problem is that there are so few aplication at this moment that can use more than even one core.