How fast are smartphones compared to desktops?

[soccerballtux]

Add 3 cores to that with a Tegra 3 40nm quadcore in 2 months and its as fast as a Pent 4.

1 ARM core @ 1.4 will get ~ a 900 score, x 4 for a quadcore = a 3600 score.

3600 is 2x faster than a Atom D525 @ 1.8

Add a 28nm shrink and 2.0ghz clocks to the Tegra 3 quad core in 8 months and you should be in Pent D territory with a gpu with console quality graphics on die, in a 2 watt envelope and 12 hour battery life due to the 5th core that conserves energy.

Sounds mighty impressive.:thumbsup:

+1

 

[happy medium]

You're forgetting that there are many, many more parts to power than just a processor.

The power you would save on a cpu and gpu alone is like 30 watts.
The LCD screen would draw the most power on a laptop with a SOC chip onboard.

Imagine the power draw of a laptop with a SSD,LCD screen, and a SOC chip with a 5th idle core with motherboard. Laptops have a huge battery compared to a phone.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Add 3 cores to that with a Tegra 3 40nm quadcore in 2 months and its as fast as a Pent 4.

iPhone 4S uses a dual core Cortex A9.

 

[soccerballtux]

iPhone 4S uses a dual core Cortex A9.

huh

 

[soccerballtux]

The power you would save on a cpu and gpu alone is like 30 watts.
The LCD screen would draw the most power on a laptop with a SOC chip onboard.

Imagine the power draw of a laptop with a SSD,LCD screen, and a SOC chip with a 5th idle core with motherboard. Laptops have a huge battery compared to a phone.

and no .NET 4 to run in the background for all your applications.
Goodbye Microsoft, goodbye Intel. Hello higher unemployment.

 

[alyarb]

Next sunner we will have a 28nm quadcore cpu @ ~ 2ghz and 2 or 3x the graphics power of todays chips.

Sure, but take the fillrate and integer performance of tegra 4, multiply it by 3, and you will still be nowhere near the PS3 or 360. We may have to agree to disagree on what justifies a console quality 3D machine.

 

[happy medium]

Sure, but take the fillrate and integer performance of tegra 4, multiply it by 3, and you will still be nowhere near the PS3 or 360. We may have to agree to disagree on what justifies a console quality 3D machine.

How about a Wii?

I see your point, but if a SOC is good enough for a PSP 2, than I would say thats pretty impressive.

I just think its pretty amazing how fast the ARM cpu/gpu SOC chips are gaining performance.
I don't think it will be long before we see these chips in laptops.

 

[Ferzerp]

The power you would save on a cpu and gpu alone is like 30 watts.
The LCD screen would draw the most power on a laptop with a SOC chip onboard.

Imagine the power draw of a laptop with a SSD,LCD screen, and a SOC chip with a 5th idle core with motherboard. Laptops have a huge battery compared to a phone.

You could, in theory, save 30ish watts *at most* on an i3 type system (and more like 10-12 with the ULV skus). That is if you left the proc at 100% utilization all day. You're going to find the number closer to an average of 5-10W savings in a best case scenario but in effect have a much, much lower theoretical amount of potential work done per battery charge of the computer.

ARM is not some magical fairy dust company. The only reason you are able to get an acceptable experience out of these devices is because of the software, not the hardware. The hardware, in terms of raw computer power is, truly, crap (it's a one-trick pony, low power consumption at the expense of all else). The software is designed to function withith that limitation though. They're good for consumption, but not creation due to those trade offs.

There *is* a huge potential for mobile computing via application or desktop presentation (i.e. VDI or Citrix) for these types of ulta low power devices, but they require massive amounts of power sucking infrastructure to work properly. You could get by much longer on a charge, because once you reach a minimum of computing power, we don't care what the end point is, as long as it can display what the real work horses are doing. And you know what? Those aren't changing from x86 anytime soon.

 

[Cerb]

and no .NET 4 to run in the background for all your applications.
Goodbye Microsoft, goodbye Intel. Hello higher unemployment.

Why wouldn't you have .NET?

 

[happy medium]

You could, in theory, save 30ish watts *at most* on an i3 type system (and more like 10-12 with the ULV skus). That is if you left the proc at 100% utilization all day. You're going to find the number closer to an average of 5-10W savings in a best case scenario but in effect have a much, much lower theoretical amount of potential work done per battery charge of the computer.

ARM is not some magical fairy dust company. The only reason you are able to get an acceptable experience out of these devices is because of the software, not the hardware. The hardware, in terms of raw computer power is, truly, crap (it's a one-trick pony, low power consumption at the expense of all else). The software is designed to function withith that limitation though. They're good for consumption, but not creation due to those trade offs.

There *is* a huge potential for mobile computing via application or desktop presentation (i.e. VDI or Citrix) for these types of ulta low power devices, but they require massive amounts of power sucking infrastructure to work properly. You could get by much longer on a charge, because once you reach a minimum of computing power, we don't care what the end point is, as long as it can display what the real work horses are doing. And you know what? Those aren't changing from x86 anytime soon.

I was comparing a 35 watts Llano cpu/gpu with a 2 watt quadcore+1 Tegra 3.
I think the 5th core power savings would be nice.

 

[alyarb]

I would say the wii has already been surpassed by 40nm SoCs, but when others talk about the PS3 struggling with a modern shooter at 720p, and you want to hold a phone chip to that same standard, it's hard.

 

[Ferzerp]

I was comparing a 35 watts Llano cpu/gpu with a 2 watt quadcore+1 Tegra 3.
I think the 5th core power savings would be nice.

You really need to be comparing nearly idle power draw on the processor scenarios because that's where most of the time is spent. You still have to power the rest of the system (screen, etc) in that situation. Sure, 2W is better, but not nearly as much as you are thinking.

 

[Fox5]

Heh, ARM SOCs are nowhere near PS3 level yet. Brazos (AMD's netbook chip) is still faster than any ARM SOC, and it doesn't come close to a ps3, by probably a factor of 2-4.

The A9 core is still slightly worse than the Atom per clock, but close enough that we could probably call them equal. Bobcat is better than Atom per clock by a decent amount, and the top Bobcat and Atom SKUs have a 50% clock speed advantage over the top ARM SKUs. At the same wattage, a core i7 ULV chip has 3-4 (maybe 5)x the processing power of Bobcat, and a similar stat would apply at the same clockspeeds. (not quite as extreme)

ARM is already an order of magnitude slower then the ULV Intel chips, although it uses an order of magnitude less power. I think things will get worse for ARM as they try to scale into Intel territory.

 

[happy medium]

You really need to be comparing nearly idle power draw on the processor scenarios because that's where most of the time is spent. You still have to power the rest of the system (screen, etc) in that situation. Sure, 2W is better, but not nearly as much as you are thinking.

I was thinking more like real world usage.
A typical Llano laptop will last 8 hours at idle, 4 hours while watching videos and 6 hours while suffing the web.

A typical SOC laptop should last at least 16 hours idle (?), 14 hours while watching a movie and 14 1/2 hours while surfing the net because while loaded the SOC chip will hardly use any more power at all than idle.

I'm just guessing but this is where power savings should shine.

 

[Ferzerp]

You're still forgetting to power the rest of the system.... You recognize this, right?

Even the ipads which are mostly battery can only do 8-10 hours, and they have a tiny, low res (compared to laptops) screen with very little in the way of peripherals.

 

[happy medium]

You're still forgetting to power the rest of the system.... You recognize this, right?

Even the ipads which are mostly battery can only do 8-10 hours, and they have a tiny, low res (compared to laptops) screen with very little in the way of peripherals.

Yea, after I clicked submit I realized. but still, I think when loaded the SOC will still save plenty of power vs the best performance per watt chip ,the Llano during real world usage.

 

[soccerballtux]

Why wouldn't you have .NET?

because you're (I'm) running android docked to the tablet docked to the keyboard docked to the desktop display

 

[soccerballtux]

Heh, ARM SOCs are nowhere near PS3 level yet. Brazos (AMD's netbook chip) is still faster than any ARM SOC, and it doesn't come close to a ps3, by probably a factor of 2-4.

The A9 core is still slightly worse than the Atom per clock, but close enough that we could probably call them equal. Bobcat is better than Atom per clock by a decent amount, and the top Bobcat and Atom SKUs have a 50% clock speed advantage over the top ARM SKUs. At the same wattage, a core i7 ULV chip has 3-4 (maybe 5)x the processing power of Bobcat, and a similar stat would apply at the same clockspeeds. (not quite as extreme)

ARM is already an order of magnitude slower then the ULV Intel chips, although it uses an order of magnitude less power. I think things will get worse for ARM as they try to scale into Intel territory.

PS3 cpu really is not that fast.

 

[soccerballtux]

I was thinking more like real world usage.
A typical Llano laptop will last 8 hours at idle, 4 hours while watching videos and 6 hours while suffing the web.

A typical SOC laptop should last at least 16 hours idle (?), 14 hours while watching a movie and 14 1/2 hours while surfing the net because while loaded the SOC chip will hardly use any more power at all than idle.

I'm just guessing but this is where power savings should shine.

they'll probably put a 3 cell in it

 

[Ferzerp]

PS3 cpu really is not that fast.

The interesting thing is, some how that proc created a weird cult just like the arm procs do today.

We were going to see cell processors in everything! x86 was dead!

Sound familiar?

 

[alyarb]

PS3 cpu really is not that fast.

This makes it good for illustrating how slow 2-watt ARM SoCs are.

 

[soccerballtux]

The interesting thing is, some how that proc created a weird cult just like the arm procs do today.

We were going to see cell processors in everything! x86 was dead!

Sound familiar?

yes. It created a cult but it didn't have the capability behind it. It was a single core In Order architecture with a bunch of DSPs (useless) strapped on. The Cell was designed with BluRay in mind, before we had GPU decoding of HD Mpeg2/4. For that, it was a success. But those 6 SPEs are rather pointless for games, besides handling the audio.

 

[soccerballtux]

This makes it good for illustrating how slow 2-watt ARM SoCs are.

haha. Touche.

But, from an architecture standpoint, at least these upcoming ARM architectures (A9, A15) don't have the inefficiencies we get with Atom (and Cell) aka stalled pipeline. This is my main beef with those 2 arch's. IMO, this is why PS3 games run less smoothly compared with Xbox360's-- it has 3 dual threaded chips running at 3-whatever ghz. Plenty of CPU resources available.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

The interesting thing is, some how that proc created a weird cult just like the arm procs do today.

We were going to see cell processors in everything! x86 was dead!

Sound familiar?

It is kind of funny that the PS3 CPU was hyped so much and yet most games, even exclusives look just as good or worse then Xbox 360 games.

 

[Ferzerp]

It is kind of funny that the PS3 CPU was hyped so much and yet most games, even exclusives look just as good or worse then Xbox 360 games.

The irony being that both are loosely (ok, very very loosely) using the same architecture.