Attention smartphone makers! This is how you should be milking the multi-core processors

It is considered, in general, that the more the cores you get in a smartphone, the efficient the CPU becomes. That probably has been the doctrine at ARM Technologies, who developed the processors and cores for dual core and now the quad core processors. However, the new quad-core and last year’s dual-core processors taxed the battery life in the name of efficiency.

What ARM and NVIDIA claim in the defence of the quad-core processors is that the new System on a Chip, or SoC is more energy efficient. According to these companies’ experts, the less one core has to work, the less energy it uses. When a program is threaded four ways to either core in the processor, the work load is divided less to each participant as compared to the chips that have two cores or one for that matter. That way the processor takes less energy from the battery.

The above premise can be a possibility on paper, but in real life we have seen that the dual-core processor-based smartphones drain the battery faster than the single-core handsets. Though we have not tested the same with quad-core phones yet, the results seem predictable.

The reason, according to the experts is that no matter how smart the processor becomes or how less every core is assigned the work load, the processor is working and the cores are in action, using the charge from a single source.

Moreover, there are not many applications that can be treaded due to their nature of work. The smartphone’s display, CPU (that’s the application processor we’ve been talking about), and the cellular radio suck up the lion’s share of the battery, and none of the aforementioned cannot be multi-threaded.

What is needed in this regard is the efficient operating system that can run one or all cores according to the need. If there is only one application running, the OS should be able run only one core of the processor to save the juice in the battery. That way the smartphones can be run more than one day with toughened up tasks.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Apr 11 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.