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Originally posted by Falcon1 View PostOops wrong article referenced
http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/01/...ig-little-soc/
They also tried to say that you can't compare them to amd or nvidia because they're a "gpu maker not a chipset maker".... lol.
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Originally posted by bmourit View Post@Cyborg16
I can see why you might think that, but the main difference in this SoC configuration is that all 8 cores can run at the same time, whereas other bigLITTLE configurations haven't allowed for this. Hence the reason they are advertising this as 8 core, and the first of it's kind. Though I suspect we'll see others soon.
Having all 8 cores able to run at the same time, rather than just switching from a15/a7 should provide significant performance boosts.
I'm not seeing a big rush to big.LITTLE in the rest of the market so maybe my opinions are shared by some of the other SoC developers out there.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostI lie ARM and they have had great ideas in the past, but big.LITTLE has to be the result of a corporate stupid moment. I just see the idea as huge waste of die space that offers little gain for most users.
Not anywhere near the boost you could get for 8 A15 cores and an architecture designed to support those cores. Hell you wouldn't even need 8 A15 cores to do the job. Combine that with freeing up space for cache and other hardware and you would be far better off.
I'm not seeing a big rush to big.LITTLE in the rest of the market so maybe my opinions are shared by some of the other SoC developers out there.
I think big.LITTLE hasn't been used yet because the implementation wasn't smart enough to provide the possible energy savings. Tegra3 was not very power efficient.
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Originally posted by Ferdinand View Postbig.LITTLE is because of energy saving. Using more die space doesn't matter because it gets turned off and doesn't use energy. A simple core like A7 needs far less energy to do the same stuff as an A15. It is only when an A7 doesn't have enough peak performance that the A15 gets enabled. If users were willing to wait for calculations in-order cpus would be the best and most power efficient cpus. But users want peak performance when scrolling etc.
I think big.LITTLE hasn't been used yet because the implementation wasn't smart enough to provide the possible energy savings. Tegra3 was not very power efficient.
I don't mean to reference A7 as an Apple fan here but rather to point that they have had great success doing exactly the opposite of what ARM was pushing. Two high performance cores instead of 4 or more mixed cores.
Frankly it looks like ARM is slightly back pedaling on big.LITTLE as they are now promoting the idea of two high performance cores supported by four low performance cores. My point is if Apples rush to idle techniques are viable and they appear to be, why bother with the low power cores at all? Save the transistors for other things and run one core for light duty and power up the other under heavy load. From all appearances the transistors used for the low power cores are wasted, especially when you consider the support logic required to manage all the switching and interfacing.
In the end I see big.LITTLE as a architectural mistake. I will be surprised if in five years it is anything more than an entry in the history books.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostFrankly it looks like ARM is slightly back pedaling on big.LITTLE as they are now promoting the idea of two high performance cores supported by four low performance cores. My point is if Apples rush to idle techniques are viable and they appear to be, why bother with the low power cores at all? Save the transistors for other things and run one core for light duty and power up the other under heavy load. From all appearances the transistors used for the low power cores are wasted, especially when you consider the support logic required to manage all the switching and interfacing.
Have there been performance/watt benchmarks of that 8 core A7 mediatek soc and Apple's A7?
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Originally posted by Ferdinand View PostIt seems logical to me that a simple core that doesn't do fancy out of order tricks uses less power than an Apple A7 that does use fancy tricks unless Apple A7 can shut down that fancy part of the core. That would be quite a trick but does that save transistors or power?
I find it very hard to believe that the people at ARM are retarded.
Have there been performance/watt benchmarks of that 8 core A7 mediatek soc and Apple's A7?
That of course isn't the best way to compare systems, but I don't have any other useful metric.
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