Smartphones going overboard with # of cores?

[soccerballtux]

Originally Posted by dma0991

So you're saying that the reviewer is wrong? I'd like to see your numbers instead of a word of mouth.


It isn't completely worthless as that is what you do with the phone most of the time. Were you expecting to run Folding on the phone instead?


Optimizing to meet the potential of the software is what you should do. Hardware and software goes hand in hand.

well, we're trying to gauge efficiency of an architecture, not pick which thing to buy in order to render pages the fastest.

[dma0991]

Originally Posted by soccerballtux

well, we're trying to gauge efficiency of an architecture, not pick which thing to buy in order to render pages the fastest.

Problem with that is there are not many standardized tests which could show the raw performance. I'm still more towards the user experience as a whole rather than focusing on performance alone. This is in contrast with desktops where I would like performance first, user experience second.

There are no good Android handphones that is before ICS. Galaxy Note with Gingerbread is awful, Galaxy Note 2 was better but it isn't the best Android phone to date IMHO. The Nexus 4 should be the best as it has decent performance and a good stock OS.

Originally Posted by Android

Jelly Bean makes your Android device even more responsive by boosting your device's CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don't need it to improve battery life.

With the focus of Android 4.2, its way better to have better per core performance than it is to cram in more cores. A 4+4 approach doesn't work as you'd want it to process it as fast as possible and goes to sleep which is better done with a faster core, not more cores.

[Exophase]

big.LITTLE doesn't require the big and little clusters to be used exclusively; there's nothing stopping you from using both simultaneously. So you can use this chip like an asynchronous and heterogeneous octo-core. That doesn't mean anyone will, though.

It could end up being a normal use case to have one Cortex-A15 powered alongside a handful of the A7 cores. Especially if the Cortex-A15s don't have independent power/clock planes.