Speculating on the A series SOC

[Joelist]

Yes I know it is an Apple design and I know Apple is not exactly held in high esteem. But the "microprocessor geek" in me gets curious about things like this. Why does Apple go to the considerable expense of designing its own CPU and chipset instead of just using the latest Snapdragon which would cost less? Why make it 64-bit? While it is nominally an ARM design there are big differences. Per tech writers it seems to be loosely based on ARMv8-A.

We also know that they have come up with an extremely high performance unit. The A7 outperformed everything out there on a core for core basis and even mostly outperformed quad cores despite being dual core. It sounds like the A8 is doing the same thing, with the only exception being physics benchmarks which expressly favor more cores.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8559/iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus-preliminary-results

My inner Geek got to wondering how this was happening. It also hearkened back a few years to when Intel dropped a bomb on the notebook computing industry with the Pentium-M (a.k.a. "Banias"). At the time the standard idea was to put a Pentium 4 with its high frequency and long pipe into a notebook and just make it sleep a lot to try to control power usage. Then along came Banias with its short but wide (twice the width of any other CPU) pipe. It also had a revolutionary new branch predictor (tries to predict the outcome of "True/False" scenarios and thus save CPU cycles) and a large and redesigned cache. The result was it was VERY power efficient and also ran rings around all other CPUs in I/O ops. Basically it catapulted Intel into notebook dominance which it has held ever since.

What does this have to do with the A7 and A8 designs? It turns out that like Banias they also have short, wide pipelines with super accurate branch prediction and large L1, L2 and L3 caches. Basically they are twice as wide as the other ARM cores on market. Add in being on a 20nm process (small die = improved performance and power usage) and the results make more sense.

Ultimately I still wonder why Apple is dropping all this money on designing its own SOC (indeed the rumor is that the next iteration will introduce an Apple designed GPU to go with the A9) and why they maintain an ARM Architecture license instead of a processor one. But whatever - it still is interesting to the "processor geek" in me.

 

[Overmind One]

Yes I know it is an Apple design and I know Apple is not exactly held in high esteem. But the "microprocessor geek" in me gets curious about things like this. Why does Apple go to the considerable expense of designing its own CPU and chipset instead of just using the latest Snapdragon which would cost less? Why make it 64-bit? While it is nominally an ARM design there are big differences. Per tech writers it seems to be loosely based on ARMv8-A.

We also know that they have come up with an extremely high performance unit. The A7 outperformed everything out there on a core for core basis and even mostly outperformed quad cores despite being dual core. It sounds like the A8 is doing the same thing, with the only exception being physics benchmarks which expressly favor more cores.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8559/iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus-preliminary-results

My inner Geek got to wondering how this was happening. It also hearkened back a few years to when Intel dropped a bomb on the notebook computing industry with the Pentium-M (a.k.a. "Banias"). At the time the standard idea was to put a Pentium 4 with its high frequency and long pipe into a notebook and just make it sleep a lot to try to control power usage. Then along came Banias with its short but wide (twice the width of any other CPU) pipe. It also had a revolutionary new branch predictor (tries to predict the outcome of "True/False" scenarios and thus save CPU cycles) and a large and redesigned cache. The result was it was VERY power efficient and also ran rings around all other CPUs in I/O ops. Basically it catapulted Intel into notebook dominance which it has held ever since.

What does this have to do with the A7 and A8 designs? It turns out that like Banias they also have short, wide pipelines with super accurate branch prediction and large L1, L2 and L3 caches. Basically they are twice as wide as the other ARM cores on market. Add in being on a 20nm process (small die = improved performance and power usage) and the results make more sense.

Ultimately I still wonder why Apple is dropping all this money on designing its own SOC (indeed the rumor is that the next iteration will introduce an Apple designed GPU to go with the A9) and why they maintain an ARM Architecture license instead of a processor one. But whatever - it still is interesting to the "processor geek" in me.

Im confused about the information you provided a bit...are you saying that the A7 outperformed the Snapdragon 800?

It is a nice processor. But it still is not more powerful than a Snapdragon 800 or 801, even if "core for core" it might have higher benchmarks. I can appreciate your admiration of the processors. Unfortunately, these processors are in Apple devices which means along with whatever performance or tweaks they have, they will end up in a device that requires membership into the Apple ecosystem, and it's performance will be tied to Apple apps in only Apple products. The Snapdragon appears in many phones and tablets that are made by many manufacturers.

In 2012, Dodge created a 600HP 4-cylinder engine for the Dodge Dart Global RallyCross. They achieved it by tweaks and adjustments, and designing it specifically for the Dodge Dart. Having said that, how relevant is it to the auto industry or to engine design overall? The A7 is a nice chip. It is VERY cheap to make. If they allowed other manufacturers to use it, they could bring down the cost of many midrange phones and tablets running dual core processors that this really competes with. Benchmarks or no, a 600hp four cylinder engine should not be in line with a 600hp 8cyl engine, or even a 400hp 8cyl engine. The A7 is a great dual core processor. But I do not think it should be compared to a 4 core processor, even if it is faster than some of them.

 

[Overmind One]

Hate to dump again, but I checked your link and I notice that the only benchmarks shows in all those graphs are BROWSER benchmarks, not CPU or OS benchmarks:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8559/iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus-preliminary-results

In the Physics benchmark (actual CPU power), it is way low on the list. Worse yet, is comparing the A6 to the A7, which shows very little improvement. NVIDIA wins in GPU performance by a HUGE margin. On that page, it is obvious that the writer placed the browser benchmarks and non-hardware tests showing Apple ahead...in the first part of the article, whilst saving the more important tests (and lower scored) graphs for the lower part of the article. Bias.

The A7 does not have integrated LTE on the chip. The Snapdragon does. The Snapdragons have higher clock speeds and can run twice as many CPU threads, even if the A7 supports 64-bit. And although the L1 cache on the A7 is larger than the L1 on the Snapdragon, the A7 has ONLY the L1 cache, whereas the Snapdragon has L1 and L2 cache.

Anyway, you asked this question:

Ultimately I still wonder why Apple is dropping all this money on designing its own SOC (indeed the rumor is that the next iteration will introduce an Apple designed GPU to go with the A9) and why they maintain an ARM Architecture license instead of a processor one. But whatever - it still is interesting to the "processor geek" in me.

The answer is that they want to own their own processor. Samsung build the last ones. Apple will be manufacturing their own crystal displays and probably batteries too, coming soon. They want an entirely closed garden where the gardeners and maintenance people are living INSIDE the walls, and are not Samsung and other companies.

 

[Joelist]

Actually it is the A8 not the A7 that paces and exceeds the current Snapdragons. The A7 beat the ones in it's generation (roughly a year ago). Also, the author specifically and correctly notes that the "browser" tests in this mode are the best proxies for CPU performance. The only bench the A series lags on is physics and that particular bench specifically rewards more cores.

I was also able to get Geekbench 3 scores on these units:

The old CPU the A7 got 1400 single and 2500 multicore. - 2 Cores at 1.3 Ghz

The new CPU the A8 got 1604 single and 2891 multicore. - 2 cores at 1.4 Ghz

This Snapdragon 801 got 978 single and 2915 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45 Ghz (this is in the Moto X)

And this Snapdragon 801 got 911 single and 2732 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45Ghz (this is in the Galaxy S5 which fairly screams that Samsung is doing something in its chipset that hampers the CPU)

And the Tegra 4 got 915 single and 2750 multicore. Of course almost no one uses the Tegra SOCs after the Tegra 3 fiasco (which is why nVidia is banking heavily on the Tegra K1 to bail them out in this area).

Side note - Anandtech is not Apple biased - they have been noteworthy for their impartiality for well over a decade and are generally considered the gold standard for these sorts of deep dive analyses because they actually do the deep dives.

Remember I am not a fanboy for Apple. Indeed if you wanted to say I've been a fan of a particular mobile CPU it would be the Snapdragons. Remember I am the one who was on here trumpeting the merits of their Krait architecture. What got my interest piqued about the Apple A7 and A8 is that there seems to have been real progress here in the world of efficiency. The only way a CPU with half the cores running at roughly 60% of the frequency of the other SOCs can do this type of stuff is if it has an extremely efficient predictor and a wide pipe. That was what reminded me of the Pentium M and its later descendant the Core 2 (which all but killed AMD in the high end to mainstream computer segments).

Now the A8 does have some elements that also explain the unusual results besides what seems to be an extremely efficient architecture. It is on a 20nm process which at present no one else is. It is also 64bit which not only is no other ARM CPU but none except the K1 are even projected to be such in the near future.

Of course the other thing is that right just now pretty much the only phone/tablet apps that even utilize more than 1-2 cores are some games, and for them it is much more about the GPU in those scenarios. It's one reason why quad core on phones typically winds up with 2 of the cores more or less in sleep mode constantly, and if the SOC does not allow for that they get poor battery life. Now if you see more apps specifically written to exploit multicore then those 2 extra cores will come into play more.

 

[Overmind One]

Actually it is the A8 not the A7 that paces and exceeds the current Snapdragons. The A7 beat the ones in it's generation (roughly a year ago). Also, the author specifically and correctly notes that the "browser" tests in this mode are the best proxies for CPU performance. The only bench the A series lags on is physics and that particular bench specifically rewards more cores.

I was also able to get Geekbench 3 scores on these units:

The old CPU the A7 got 1400 single and 2500 multicore. - 2 Cores at 1.3 Ghz

The new CPU the A8 got 1604 single and 2891 multicore. - 2 cores at 1.4 Ghz

This Snapdragon 801 got 978 single and 2915 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45 Ghz (this is in the Moto X)

And this Snapdragon 801 got 911 single and 2732 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45Ghz (this is in the Galaxy S5 which fairly screams that Samsung is doing something in its chipset that hampers the CPU)

And the Tegra 4 got 915 single and 2750 multicore. Of course almost no one uses the Tegra SOCs after the Tegra 3 fiasco (which is why nVidia is banking heavily on the Tegra K1 to bail them out in this area).

Side note - Anandtech is not Apple biased - they have been noteworthy for their impartiality for well over a decade and are generally considered the gold standard for these sorts of deep dive analyses because they actually do the deep dives.

Remember I am not a fanboy for Apple. Indeed if you wanted to say I've been a fan of a particular mobile CPU it would be the Snapdragons. Remember I am the one who was on here trumpeting the merits of their Krait architecture. What got my interest piqued about the Apple A7 and A8 is that there seems to have been real progress here in the world of efficiency. The only way a CPU with half the cores running at roughly 60% of the frequency of the other SOCs can do this type of stuff is if it has an extremely efficient predictor and a wide pipe. That was what reminded me of the Pentium M and its later descendant the Core 2 (which all but killed AMD in the high end to mainstream computer segments).

Now the A8 does have some elements that also explain the unusual results besides what seems to be an extremely efficient architecture. It is on a 20nm process which at present no one else is. It is also 64bit which not only is no other ARM CPU but none except the K1 are even projected to be such in the near future.

Of course the other thing is that right just now pretty much the only phone/tablet apps that even utilize more than 1-2 cores are some games, and for them it is much more about the GPU in those scenarios. It's one reason why quad core on phones typically winds up with 2 of the cores more or less in sleep mode constantly, and if the SOC does not allow for that they get poor battery life. Now if you see more apps specifically written to exploit multicore then those 2 extra cores will come into play more.

Im only down on the A7 because it only appears in Apple products, which means it has no relevance to the smartphone industry as a whole. AND, it isnt the best processor out there.

 

[Joelist]

Actually I have demonstrated from multiple sources now that it is the best one out there. Number of cores is a false statistic in the smartphone world because virtually nothing is written to use more than 2 cores and the nature of a smartphone app means that isn't likely to change anytime soon. Things like on die LTE mean nothing with regards to a CPU because that is a SOC characteristic. And in the GPU world both Apple and the Android OEMs are using the same parts in most instances.

Looking down on something just because it is Apple makes no more sense to me than Apple cultists looking down on anything not Apple. I find this fascinating because what it shows is a move towards efficiency in the CPU.

Now what does puzzle me is where Apple is expecting to get their ROI on this. They have been poaching well regarded microprocessor engineers, technicians, designers and developers from Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, nVidia and others for about 5 years now. They maintain an extremely expensive Architecture license as opposed to the less expensive Processor one. They invested in TSMC to help them get their 20nm process up to speed. And remember again I am not an Apple fanboy, just trying to puzzle it out as it is an interesting mystery.

If this were not a smartphone OEM I would almost think they are planning to enter the chipset business themselves and become a direct competitor with Qualcomm and Intel and others. As it is one and one that uses Qualcomm modems in its mobile technology and Intel CPUs in its notebooks and the Mac Pro I don't see that happening.

I'm sorry I caused a ruckus. I'm more of a "general microprocessor and architecture" geek and things that may be advances (regardless of vendor) interest me.

 

[Overmind One]

Actually I have demonstrated from multiple sources now that it is the best one out there. Number of cores is a false statistic in the smartphone world because virtually nothing is written to use more than 2 cores and the nature of a smartphone app means that isn't likely to change anytime soon. Things like on die LTE mean nothing with regards to a CPU because that is a SOC characteristic. And in the GPU world both Apple and the Android OEMs are using the same parts in most instances

Um, no you have not. I posted links AND photos of side by side comparisons proving that it is not the best out there. Its a dual core processor. That alone tosses it out of the running with quad cores. It only has L1 cache and can process only two CPU threads. Any quad core can process 4 simultaneous threads and the A7 simply cannot no matter what they do to it. Apple has done with the A7 as GM used to do when tweaking 20 year old engines to throw into the current models. It is old, and because of that it is VERY cheap to make. Apple likes it because of these reasons. Why do YOU like it?

Looking down on something just because it is Apple makes no more sense to me than Apple cultists looking down on anything not Apple. I find this fascinating because what it shows is a move towards efficiency in the CPU.

Apple is for cultists. Everything else is for everyone. You seem to be ignoring this. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you are in a cage, plain and simple. The A7 is found only in your cage. The Snapdragon is out there for everyone else who wants one, and in many different phones from many manufacturers. If you get a phone with an A7 in it, then you are buying an Apple product, and thus joining the Apple cult.

Now what does puzzle me is where Apple is expecting to get their ROI on this. They have been poaching well regarded microprocessor engineers, technicians, designers and developers from Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, nVidia and others for about 5 years now. They maintain an extremely expensive Architecture license as opposed to the less expensive Processor one. They invested in TSMC to help them get their 20nm process up to speed. And remember again I am not an Apple fanboy, just trying to puzzle it out as it is an interesting mystery.

Um NO! The A7 costs very little to make. About $20.00 ( http://recode.net/2014/09/23/teardown-shows-apples-iphone-6-cost-at-least-200-to-build/). The Snapdragon 800 costs about $41.00 to build (http://press.ihs.com/press-release/...ries-astronomical-bill-materials-ihs-teardown) It is a low cost processor which is why Apple wants to make it. Samsung has been making the APL5698 for them, and the newer one is still cheap. Where are you getting this stuff? Apple's ROI is in place just by using this chip. It is so cheap to make and the technology is old, but stuck in a new overpriced iPhone6, they make a fortune.

If this were not a smartphone OEM I would almost think they are planning to enter the chipset business themselves and become a direct competitor with Qualcomm and Intel and others. As it is one and one that uses Qualcomm modems in its mobile technology and Intel CPUs in its notebooks and the Mac Pro I don't see that happening.

Not gonna happen. Qualcomm and Intel are making chips for everyone. They are making chips for most every tablet and phone and netbook, as well as other specialty devices. Apple will never do that because they are profit driven and not technology driven. Every single Apple device bar none is behind somebody else's devices technologically.

I'm sorry I caused a ruckus. I'm more of a "general microprocessor and architecture" geek and things that may be advances (regardless of vendor) interest me.

Its okay to cause a ruckus, but you cant just post Apple's marketing lies and expect them to go unchallenged. I challenged the following statements you made in this post:

"Actually I have demonstrated from multiple sources now that it is the best one out there.". No, you did not and it is NOT the best one out there. It is the best A7 out there. Just like Chewbacca is the best wookie out there.

"Looking down on something just because it is Apple makes no more sense to me than Apple cultists looking down on anything not Apple." Apple is a closed source, closed use product line. None of the others are.

Apple is not a regular company. It is singularly Apple and it does things Apple's way or no way at all. Apple products are an affront to information technology as well as technological progress. They want to ssell products, not advance technology. This is why I diss them.

 

[Joelist]

I didn't post "marketing lies" and your insinuating that I did is insulting.

I did prove it is the better CPU but you are obsessed with number of cores which in the mobile world has no meaning (because pretty much no mobile applications use more than one core much less more than two). As a result when you're looking at this it is per core that matters. Core for core the A7 in its time and now the A8 outperform all the other ARM CPUs despite being down clocked to only half the frequency to save more power. And even on multicore scores they either tie or beat CPUs with twice the number of cores running at a much higher frequency. The question becomes - why? It has nothing to do with being pro or anti-Apple. It has to do with the question of why these processors perform in this manner.

Also, the teardown has nothing to do with maintaining the much higher cost architecture license. Or using a very advanced bleeding edge fab. Also remember the Snapdragon has its modems on the chip and the A series does not do so yet. So you need to add in the cost for those chips to compare properly.

I am not understanding this hatred of Apple any more than I understand the cult of it. Frankly I don't care if it's Apple, I'm interested in why this chip performs like it does.

 

[Overmind One]

I didn't post "marketing lies" and your insinuating that I did is insulting.

I did prove it is the better CPU but you are obsessed with number of cores which in the mobile world has no meaning (because pretty much no mobile applications use more than one core much less more than two). As a result when you're looking at this it is per core that matters. Core for core the A7 in its time and now the A8 outperform all the other ARM CPUs despite being down clocked to only half the frequency to save more power. And even on multicore scores they either tie or beat CPUs with twice the number of cores running at a much higher frequency. The question becomes - why? It has nothing to do with being pro or anti-Apple. It has to do with the question of why these processors perform in this manner.

Ill address the other statements later, but you just did not prove this. I posted links AND charts, and you are merely stating these "facts" without support.

The A7 and the Snapdragon 800 specification comparison:

Differences:

Please show me where and how the A7 is a better CPU? You are not going to be able to do that because it simply is not true. You are stating it as fact, and it is not a fact except that Apple says it is. Apple claims it is the best smartphone. It is not. Apple claims that it has the strongest glass, the best "user experience", the thinnest phone on the market, and it even claims it is the most popular phone. All lies or extreme exaggerations.

Show me that the A7 is a better CPU. You did not do that anywhere in this thread, and this is the second time I have proven that wrong in this thread. The A7 is found in Apple devices ONLY. There is no Apple product that can be compared to the Snapdragon deployments in Galaxy phones, HTX phones or LG phones using it.

Dont just tell me, SHOW me.

You started your comment with "Why does Apple go to the considerable expense of designing its own CPU and chipset instead of just using the latest Snapdragon which would cost less?"

The jazzed up dual core A7 DOES cost less. Much much less. Less than HALF the cost of a Snapdragon 800. That is why they like it. Apple does not care about technological advancements, it wants to use the cheapest possible CPU to run it's iO7/iO8 apps without compromise, which is what is driving the development of this chip. It is yesterday's technology with a turbocharger. I could soup up a 1970's v8 Vette with a supercharger and nitrous, and blow the doors of a Lamborghini Murcielago, but does that make it "better"?

 

[Overmind One]

Actually it is the A8 not the A7 that paces and exceeds the current Snapdragons. The A7 beat the ones in it's generation (roughly a year ago). Also, the author specifically and correctly notes that the "browser" tests in this mode are the best proxies for CPU performance. The only bench the A series lags on is physics and that particular bench specifically rewards more cores.

I was also able to get Geekbench 3 scores on these units:

The old CPU the A7 got 1400 single and 2500 multicore. - 2 Cores at 1.3 Ghz

The new CPU the A8 got 1604 single and 2891 multicore. - 2 cores at 1.4 Ghz

This Snapdragon 801 got 978 single and 2915 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45 Ghz (this is in the Moto X)

And this Snapdragon 801 got 911 single and 2732 multicore - 4 cores at 2.45Ghz (this is in the Galaxy S5 which fairly screams that Samsung is doing something in its chipset that hampers the CPU).

How is this showing that the A7 chip is better than the Snapdragon? The Snapdragon can process 4 threads, and the A7 can only process 2. In it's favor (normally) would be the switch to 64-bit architecture which bests the 32-bit architecture of the Snapdragon, but iOS7 and iOS8 cannot make use of it, and neither can any of the apps at the moment. Four cores is better than two. Just like 6 cylinders is better than 4, which is not as good as 8 cylinders. In computers, a slower quad core based PC will outperform a much faster clocked dual core in computational data rates (which DO favor more cores).

Forgive my directness, I just am not at all fooled by anything Apple comes up with. Their goal is to give the PERCEPTION of superiority, not to actually possess it. Trying to claim that the A7 is "better" because it excels in a couple of benchmarks is sorta like this:

Nobody shopping for a Mercedes is going to even think about buying a Kia. Likewise, not too many people who are truly lovers of technology is going to look over at Apple and be impressed.

 

[Joelist]

I'm not even sure what you're trying to assert anymore except a version of "I hate Apple and Apple sucks". You keep fixating on number of cores and ignoring that it is almost devoid of meaning in an app universe where virtually all apps are single threaded, a tiny minority are dual threaded and virtually none go higher than that. And then ignoring the reality that in multiple benches you have a CPU with half the number of cores and running at only a bit over half the frequency which blows them out of the water on a per core basis and matches/slightly exceeds them even in multicore.

Oh, and compute performance also has nothing to do with number of cores. Number of cores only provides an advantage equal to the amount of the running software that has been parallelized (Amdahl's law). Which goes back yet again to.....virtually no software in the highly mobile arena is dual threaded to say nothing of being tri-threaded or quad-threaded.

Now granted this is leaving Graphics out of the equation. Which is intentional as the topic was a CPU not any GPUs involved.

Price wise, you have to add in the Baseband chip here because the A series does not have it on die. When you do that per Teardown you're looking at about $59.50 not $20.00:

http://www.techinsights.com/teardown.com/apple-iphone-6/

This compares to the $41 on the Qualcomm which is really nice because it is both Core Application (CPU) and Baseband. So Apple is spending more not less than others in this area because they are buying the Baseband chips while the Snapdragons have it on die. This refutes your entire idea of "cheapest possible". If they really were trying to do that they would simply use the 801 and save $18 per unit.

On your car engine analogy, here is the the proper way to compare them. Engine 1 has 8 cylinders which each generate 50 horsepower for a 400 hp engine. Engine B has 4 cylinders each of which generates 105 hp for a 420 hp engine. However, the reality is that CPUs don't function like car engines.

A better analogy is to go back to what I noted in my OP. The Pentium-M and also the Core micro architecture. At that time it was AMD who everyone said was da bomb with its dual cores and high frequencies. Intel had the awful Pentium 4 which had a single core, a HIGH frequency and also terrible power and thermal characteristics.

Then the Intel Israel design team devised the Pentium-M (Banias) which had a radically lower frequency, a pipe much shorter and twice as wide as other CPUs and a super accurate branch predictor. The result was the (at the time) single core Pentium-M outperformed its AMD dual core competition in everything except graphics AND used less power to boot. And did it at a much lower clock speed (frequency). Later editions went Dual Core (called Core Duo) and then the same design philosophy of short, wide pipes with emphasis on accurate prediction was refined further into Core2Duo and so on.

Which leads to a theory - I don't think Apple actually "innovated" so to speak here - I think the reason they have been poaching so aggressively from Intel was they wanted the expertise that created the Core micro architecture. They also wanted people who could help translate it into ARM hence poaching from the others. The A series IS an impressive CPU with its extreme efficiency. It is also eerily similar in concept to Intel's Core family of CPU. In other words, they "legally stole" the underlying concepts off of Intel.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Actually I have demonstrated from multiple sources now that it is the best one out there. Number of cores is a false statistic in the smartphone world because virtually nothing is written to use more than 2 cores and the nature of a smartphone app means that isn't likely to change anytime soon.

That's partly true. Although the processes themselves will not split their tasks / threads among multiple cores, the OS will load balance the individual processes across the cores. In theory, 4 apps running simultaneously on a quad-core processor will each be using one of the cores. This will outperform a single core of similar power running all 4 processes.

 

[Joelist]

That's partly true. Although the processes themselves will not split their tasks / threads among multiple cores, the OS will load balance the individual processes across the cores. In theory, 4 apps running simultaneously on a quad-core processor will each be using one of the cores. This will outperform a single core of similar power running all 4 processes.

True. Of course that scenario is much less likely in the phone/tablet world than in the PC world (having 4 apps running actively at the exact same time). Plus the way an OS handles multiple apps running will also affect things as will the effectiveness of the CPUs branch manager.

 

[Overmind One]

True. Of course that scenario is much less likely in the phone/tablet world than in the PC world (having 4 apps running actively at the exact same time). Plus the way an OS handles multiple apps running will also affect things as will the effectiveness of the CPUs branch manager.

Android does it by default. Apps do not automatically close or hibernate as they did in iOS before multitasking. Android has had true multitasking since day one. Without those four cores the Galaxy has right now, many of the apps would not run as well.

 

[Bluce Ree]

True. Of course that scenario is much less likely in the phone/tablet world than in the PC world (having 4 apps running actively at the exact same time). Plus the way an OS handles multiple apps running will also affect things as will the effectiveness of the CPUs branch manager.

Simultaneous processing is becoming more common and can be a performance killer. Have you ever noticed your phone stuttering during an auto app update? Or your typing falling behind as the virtual keyboard battles the chat app for priority?

 

[Joelist]

Actually no. I run Cyanogenmod so I don't have all the Google spyware and crap on my phone, and also am pretty on top of closing stuff down when I am not using it.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Actually no. I run Cyanogenmod so I don't have all the Google spyware and crap on my phone, and also am pretty on top of closing stuff down when I am not using it.

What I described occurred more commonly on older smartphones. My mom has a single core LG that likes to freeze up momentarily a lot. Sometimes, I hit the phone app and it can take up to 30 seconds before the phone shows if it's doing something else, like notifying the user that a new message came in.