Mediatek MOAR COARS!
- Thread starter monstercameron
- Start date
Mediatek working together with AMD now confirmed.
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
" (Asking out of curiosity)
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
" (Asking out of curiosity)
Arachnotronic
Lifer
- Mar 10, 2006
- 11,715
- 2,012
- 126
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
No, there really isn't.
Mediatek working together with AMD now confirmed.
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
No, it's strictly for marketing. Fewer cores with a much higher IPC, and low clock rates are best for mobile devices. Apples A8, and ARM's A72 would be far better.
Mobile devices don't really run a lot of things at the same time, so most of your die space is wasted on cores that won't really do anything. Plus, to get any kind of response out of smaller weaker cores you have to crank up the clock rate, and the voltage. Both a bad idea for mobile devices.....
Mediatek working together with AMD now confirmed.
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
it would make a great tablet soc.
Funny. Why are we having 8/10 cores in mobile phones, and still only 4 cores on desktops?
If anything desktops would benefit more from more cores.
If anything desktops would benefit more from more cores.
ShintaiDK
Lifer
- Apr 22, 2012
- 20,378
- 146
- 106
Because its a gimmick that hardly cost anything. And Software doesnt use it. Its pure marketing.
Considerign they only use 2 A72 and 8 A53, where half is much lower clocked. Its about equal to take a dualcore Core and add 8 Atom cores, with 4 of them being extra slow.
Is that your dream case?
ShintaiDK
Lifer
- Apr 22, 2012
- 20,378
- 146
- 106
Its funny to see when companies dont have to cater for the lowest determinator in terms of marketing, but rather on actual performance and benefits. Then a dualcore for smartphones is the best option (Apple). I wonder how the impact, specially on the Android phones will be when/if this mentality changes and people dont fall for the "moar cores" trick.
Mediatek working together with AMD now confirmed.
Lol just kidding...but seriously...is there any actual need for 10 core mobile SoCs like this?
The more pressing question is if there is a need for 4 core mobile socs, and the answer is largely the same, no there isn't.
Cause the manufacturers of desktop parts are somewhat sane. The mobile manufacturers/designers are mostly insane and hoping that high numbers will sell even when the numbers are actually 100% counter productive to actual user experience. Even desktop machine can rarely keep 4 cores active and yet mobile guys with close to 100% less concurrency are selling 8...
I've supported big.LITTLE as a means of getting better scaling and better supporting asynchronous workloads but this tiny.MEDIUM.HUGE approach seems like overkill. In big.LITTLE SoCs today there's some discontinuity in the perf/W curve going from the little cores to the big ones, but not a lot. With Cortex-A72 decreasing power consumption and raising performance at the same clock speeds I expect this gap to only lower, especially if Vmin goes down (as it would with a FinFET process, but are they even using anything but 28HPM for this?). Which gives precious little increased efficiency for the medium cores. It does increase overall thread count, but we all know that there isn't a lot outside of benchmarks that will put > 6 cores to good use on mobile devices.
Looks like just yet another chip designed for AnTuTu and other popular benchmarks that mindlessly overvalue core count...
Looks like just yet another chip designed for AnTuTu and other popular benchmarks that mindlessly overvalue core count...
with the proper software and work queue optimization and prioritization, I'm pretty sure everything could run on 3 A53s at 1.2ghz while the rest of the stuff you're not doing at the moment got backgrounded (IE, chrome page rendering comes first, when that's finished, move on to the rest of the stuff that was queued).
I would do a 2+3 configuration.
The problem is when dialer takes 5 seconds of full CPU processing to load up, and that's assuming you're lucky to have it in RAM to begin with. If it has to swap out something else to disk and load dialer from the ROM, you're lucky to even answer the phone in time
I would do a 2+3 configuration.
The problem is when dialer takes 5 seconds of full CPU processing to load up, and that's assuming you're lucky to have it in RAM to begin with. If it has to swap out something else to disk and load dialer from the ROM, you're lucky to even answer the phone in time
poofyhairguy
Lifer
- Nov 20, 2005
- 14,612
- 318
- 126
It sells for MediaTek because they're a cheap integrated modem solution and this is what passes as added value. The alternative is to get an SoC in the same tier from another manufacturer that uses the same cores but less of them for about the same price. While on the desktop, the alternative is to get fewer but better cores from Intel for a similar price (or lots of cores from Intel for a much higher price)
It's not only Mediatek. Both Samsung and Qualcomm are having 8 core SoCs on mobile too. And they all sell very well.
I think one of the main reasons we're not seeing 8 cores on desktop despite having gone from 65 nm (Q6600) -> 14 nm is that Intel does not want to cannibalize on it's high margin server CPUs. So there are simply no mainstream 8 core Intel CPUs available on the market.
On mobile, the SoC manufacturers do not have to take any such cannibalization concerns into account.
Instead of optimizing one core to all the power profile these companies are using different types of cores to different types of workloads. It's just a different approach, reducing R&D expenditures and TTM but paying higher manufacturing costs to reach the desired performance envelope.
No one really knows if it sells on mobile or not. Its not like there is enough of a competitive eco system of different designs out there to decide. Well there kinda is, and so far historically, the 8 core designs haven't sold. They are only selling right now because there isn't an alternative. Snapdragon was somewhat reasonable, but even it had too many cores. But the issue is no one out there besides Apple is doing a sane design. Pretty much everyone is doing a 4+4 BL. So we don't know if the actual market give a hoot about number of cores because there hasn't been a head to head of premium products separated by core count. Though I doubt that QCOM will stick at 8 cores once Kryo is out, I forsee them dropping back down to 4 like somewhat sane people.
No, big little is an inherently bad design. Anyone with a decent core is going to have appropriate clock and power gating along with responsive VF response and not need the bl BS. bl has massive overheads and is generally no better than the slower cores which it tends to run on for just about everything except benchmarks which are hand picked to run on the big cores. AKA most of the time bl is worse than just all small cores in the first place from both a performance AND power perspective.
QCOM only has 8 cores cause they got caught with their pants down on the 64b transition, prior to needing to used A53/57 to fill in, they we maxed at 4 cores with krait, and its fully expected that they'll be back to 4 cores with kyro/kryo. Samsung is running the sub-standard bl.BS like everyone else cause they aren't actually doing anything useful with the design. And 99.999% of the time 7 of the cores are idle.
Intel is still at 4 cores because quite simply the software available doesn't even take advantage of 4 cores yet. Cause for the most part, writing multithreaded code is hard.
There's 8 of the same low end and there's 4+4 big.LITTLE, both are addressing different problems. You don't see big.LITTLE on desktops or even laptops because there isn't as much of a pressing need to actively use CPU cores down to below 200mW per core. And if you do, Intel has Atom which has better dynamic range into low MHz than something like Cortex-A57.
Ignoring big.LITTLE, Qualcomm throws 8 lower-middle end cores on an SoC because MediaTek does and started doing it before them. I can all but guarantee you they wouldn't otherwise. And they can do it because the cores they're adding are very small and cheap, increasing the overall SoC size by only a small amount, and are paired with little extra L2 cache to boot. AFAIK Samsung hasn't followed this trend. And even some of these still follow the big.LITTLE philosophy with a lower clocked cluster paired with a higher clocked one.
Intel cores are big (much, much bigger than Cortex-A53), putting 8 or even 6 of them on a mainstream consumer chip results in a much larger and more expensive die, which is not a cheap value proposition for something most users don't benefit from. So why bother?
Intel already sells a class of server CPUs that are the same die as the desktop ones.. the statement basically boils down to "Intel doesn't want to sell 8 core chips because Intel doesn't want to cannibalize their 8 core desktop chips." The fact is that they DO sell 8 core chips for desktop enthusiasts, they just charge a lot of money for them, because they can. That would be the same if they made an 8 core desktop chip that ran on the same socket that the mainstream desktop chips run on, only it'd be substantially more expensive because it'd have to absorb the costs of making yet another die for a product few people want.
Kryo. It's just Kryo. There's no ambiguity. Qualcomm has officially named it.
ClockHound
Golden Member
- Nov 27, 2007
- 1,111
- 219
- 106
I like moar coars!!!
While it may be true that it's hard to write software to use more than four cores, it's not hard to run a bunch of programs that don't use more than four at the same time. It's not DOS anymore - can actually run more than one task at a time.
One task, one core. Is that asking for so much?
;-)
While it may be true that it's hard to write software to use more than four cores, it's not hard to run a bunch of programs that don't use more than four at the same time. It's not DOS anymore - can actually run more than one task at a time.
One task, one core. Is that asking for so much?
;-)
TRENDING THREADS
-
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)- Started by DisEnchantment
- Replies: 25K
-
Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes + WCL Discussion Threads
- Started by Tigerick
- Replies: 24K
-
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread- Started by TheF34RChannel
- Replies: 23K
-
-
Facebook
Twitter