Quad-core processors: Do they really double up the efficiency of smartphones? – Part 2

Getting a license to custom build a CPU core based on ARM’s raw instruction set and managing everything from design of the entire ARM-based system to the final production is the path to even better performance, says Qualcomm’s Raj Talluri, vice president of product management.

“We’re able to get more performance with two processors than our competition can get with four,” he said of Qualcomm. Although Talluri didn’t say it outright, he could have easily been defending HTC’s decision to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor on the One X in the U.S. and Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor elsewhere. For their part, Nvidia bought licensing rights for ARM’s faster A15 chip in 2011 and Tegra 4 rumors are already coming to light.

Therefore it can be said that more processors do not necessarily mean better performance.

The question here is that whether the overall circuit in the smartphone able to milk the efficiency of the multi-cores. The answer is no. Doubling the processors not necessarily means that the performance has been double. There certainly is going to be a difference in the speeds and efficiency the graphs will not go double up because of the two core instead of one or four cores instead of two.

If the entire system is efficient (more on that later), Qualcomm’s Talluri said, you will see increased performance. Just don’t expect said performance to actually double.

The basic reason why quad core cannot compete with dual core on double the performance game, likewise with dual-core and single-core, is because the apps are not designed in that way. Most of the apps are designed to render in a single thread. The cores cannot make distribute code into two or four parts. That can only happen when the operating system has good coordination with hardware or the app has the capability of multi-threading.

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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.