Qualcomm Announces Four New Snapdragon Processors

[Prosthetic Head]

Optimal core mix depends on your usage scenario...

Optimal core mix depends on your usage scenario...
For most phone usage models the hexacore version makes more sense (the 618), with 2 big cores and 4 power efficient small cores. When recording high frame rate HD videos, playing games or something else very intensive you can wake up the big beasts and the rest of the time the 4 small cores will get the work done plenty fast enough and use a lot less energy to get it done. In most mobile use cases there's little call for 4 big cores in reality. Quad bigs make sense for 'convergence' devices which will spend some of their time powered, cooled and used more like a laptop / desktop or in server applications (not the target for these specific SoCs) but not in the most common mobile scenarios.

[gnufreex]

big.LITTLE works via 4 high power cores and 4 low poer cores. You generally use the low power cores unless the extra oomph is temporarily needed, when the work is switched to the 4 high power cores.

Now when you already have a design with 8 cores, being able to use them all if the workload can handle it seems sensible.

I think 4+4 cores is stupid waste of die space, it is better to use 1 small core and 4 big ones. One for idling which is most of the time since phone is idling most of the time. And four big ones for pretty much everything else.

[droidhacker]

I think 4+4 cores is stupid waste of die space, it is better to use 1 small core and 4 big ones. One for idling which is most of the time since phone is idling most of the time. And four big ones for pretty much everything else.

Believe it or not, that *is* actually how a phone works NOW.

These so-called "4-core" processors, actually have more than 4-cores. The 4 "application processor" cores usually ARE idle. If the phone has its screen turned off, sitting in your pocket, doing apparently nothing... it really is that way. The application processors ARE off.

Some of the other cores could be running. Things like the baseband processor. That is the core that runs the actual cell radio. When a call comes in, it sends an interrupt to the application processor, waking it up and triggering the "phone is ringing" procedure. Other cores could also be running, like on a lot of recent motorola phones, you'll find a natural voice processor, designed to recognize certain voice commands using very low power. The sensor processor, used to trigger a wakeup on bump or proximity or touch.

BIG.little isn't so much about idle/wake, its about how much processing power this WAKE process requires. I.e., most of the time that the processor is AWAKE, even with the screen on, it will be running predominantly on the little cores. Crank up all the little cores at a medium workload for good RESPONSIVENESS in a multi-processing environment (much more responsive than a SINGLE BIG core, even if that single core is "stronger" than the sum of 4 littles), and way lower power than cranking up all the big cores at LOW workload... in fact, more responsive even than cranking up all the BIG cores at a LOW workload, because they'll be stuck down at low frequency!

[droidhacker]

Am I the only one thinking an octa-core on a mobile phone is dumb and useless ?
Is an android phone really have 8 threads/programs/whatever that ALL need their own cpu at 100% ??

This really smells the purest marketing sh*t...

Oh sorry, of course it will beat all older cpu with 200% perf, because 2x more core = 2x more score in benchmarks

Uhm... qualcomm doesn't make CPUs for apple. Most qualcomm chips go into Android phones, which can... you know... multitask. Normal phone usage does NOT involve running just a single process written by a braindead child. Fact is that the days when single-core processing performance mattered are LONG over.

Also, I find it inappropriate that you limit your second question in scope to PHONE.
Really? Phone? Because that's all that Android runs on, right? A phone, and all a phone has to do, of course, is be able to make and answer phone calls. It, of course, does NOT run on TABLETS, which are gaining ground as the hardware and software matures as viable replacements for laptops for most people.

Oh look at this;

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=core.git;a=shortlog;h=refs%2Fheads%2Ffeature%2Ftiled-editing

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

Most people use their computers for word processing, web browsing, email, and media consumption. Word processing is coming (yeah, there are some "phone" document editors, but they are ALL garbage, and there are some realllllllly ugly messes that are basically unusable, like andropenoffice), the rest are well established.

Now imagine something new; you have a typical desktop or laptop. You have to set it all up separately from your phone to do the things you need it to do. What if you didn't have to do that? What if just being in proximity to a dumb-ish screen/keyboard/mouse caused them to hook in to your phone? Hmm, now we are getting into an interesting idea. Now you might want to have some of that interesting multi-threaded software installed on your phone.

[robclark]

Will it work with Freedreno?

Adreno 405 should be pretty similar to 420, which is already supported. In userspace it is probably just a matter of a oneline patch to add a "case 405:" in a switch statement. And some small patch on the kernel side.

The "next-gen adreno" would likely be more work.. given the designers tendency to at least move all the registers around between generations. My wild guess is, way back before apple introduced 64b, qcom's original roadmap had a4xx paired w/ 32b cpu's, and then planned a5xx to introduce 64b support to coincide w/ a 64b armv8 krait successor. So hopefully the transition to 64b is all that qcom has time to change for a5xx ;-)

[Passso]

Uhm... qualcomm doesn't make CPUs for apple. Most qualcomm chips go into Android phones, which can... you know... multitask. Normal phone usage does NOT involve running just a single process written by a braindead child. Fact is that the days when single-core processing performance mattered are LONG over.

Also, I find it inappropriate that you limit your second question in scope to PHONE.
Really? Phone? Because that's all that Android runs on, right? A phone, and all a phone has to do, of course, is be able to make and answer phone calls. It, of course, does NOT run on TABLETS, which are gaining ground as the hardware and software matures as viable replacements for laptops for most people.

Oh look at this;

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=core.git;a=shortlog;h=refs%2Fheads%2Ffeature%2Ftiled-editing

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like.

Most people use their computers for word processing, web browsing, email, and media consumption. Word processing is coming (yeah, there are some "phone" document editors, but they are ALL garbage, and there are some realllllllly ugly messes that are basically unusable, like andropenoffice), the rest are well established.

Now imagine something new; you have a typical desktop or laptop. You have to set it all up separately from your phone to do the things you need it to do. What if you didn't have to do that? What if just being in proximity to a dumb-ish screen/keyboard/mouse caused them to hook in to your phone? Hmm, now we are getting into an interesting idea. Now you might want to have some of that interesting multi-threaded software installed on your phone.

Interressant point of view. But due to complexity of coding, multi-threaded softwares are rares in general, and even more on tablets and smartphones.

I hear the multi-processor power myth since 20 years and excepted for dedicated servers with specific softwares multi_procing improves really poorly speed and usage.

How many people buy 8 cores i7 to play games and get the same results than a i3 with 2 cores ? A lot.
How many people buy 48 cores servers while their memory or hard drives are huge bottlenecks ? A lot.

I agree that 8 cores are a big step and could make miracles with a lot of work, but considering the costs and the short development time nowadays I bet you would not see the difference between 8 cores and 2 cores for a mobile or tablet usage with actual apps.

[vadix]

Interressant point of view. But due to complexity of coding, multi-threaded softwares are rares in general, and even more on tablets and smartphones.

I hear the multi-processor power myth since 20 years and excepted for dedicated servers with specific softwares multi_procing improves really poorly speed and usage.

How many people buy 8 cores i7 to play games and get the same results than a i3 with 2 cores ? A lot.
How many people buy 48 cores servers while their memory or hard drives are huge bottlenecks ? A lot.

I agree that 8 cores are a big step and could make miracles with a lot of work, but considering the costs and the short development time nowadays I bet you would not see the difference between 8 cores and 2 cores for a mobile or tablet usage with actual apps.

The cores are already doing great work for power consumption benefits since cores can be clocked lower and run on lower voltage. They are also doing great work for intensive apps like games that actually need the power. Plus there are some nice applications and it would be nice to have the power available. I don't see why you think benefiting from multiple cores is a "myth." If you are talking totally about performance, then you might be right, but these days power consumption is another factor, and parallelizable code ABSOLUTELY can benefit from the cores, so mobile devs will make use of it where necessary, while power consumption benefits from reduced clock speeds already as it is since it can better spread the load.

[scottishduck]

You need only to look at the efficiency of Apple's A8 SoC to recognise that big.LITTLE is a failed experiment and they should change course.

[GreatEmerald]

I only wish Qualcomm's hardware was more open(-source friendly). But that's not very likely to happen.

[liam]

The cores are already doing great work for power consumption benefits since cores can be clocked lower and run on lower voltage. They are also doing great work for intensive apps like games that actually need the power. Plus there are some nice applications and it would be nice to have the power available. I don't see why you think benefiting from multiple cores is a "myth." If you are talking totally about performance, then you might be right, but these days power consumption is another factor, and parallelizable code ABSOLUTELY can benefit from the cores, so mobile devs will make use of it where necessary, while power consumption benefits from reduced clock speeds already as it is since it can better spread the load.

I think he has in mind single applications which are heavily threaded. Of course a modern os is running far more than whatever app happens to be in your face (interrupt handling is a big one, but many, many others).
big. LITTLE makes a lot of sense but, as I said earlier, the kernel isn't quite up to the task. It's getting better but the problem is one that NO ONE has yet solved for the general case. Even without that ideal scheduler big.LITTLE has a lot of space to improve. The very low power little cores are it's biggest advantage that will allow a responsive device that uses very little energy.
Apple's just made "x86"-like big cores and used their normal scheduler. Certainly less work on their software side but less efficient that big.LITTLE.