Modern Phones vs PC Relics

[SimplyComplex]

Had a funny conversation today, with someone telling me his 8-core S5 is "Faster than an i7 Devil's Canyon", which was pretty hilarious. No, an 8-core Exynos running at "2.1 ghz" is not even close to a 2nd gen Haswell. Yes 8x2.1 = 16.8. And the i7 4ghz*4xcore is 16.0. So it has "more ghz". But you can't compare ghz except within architecture.

But what it did make me question is how fast these modern chips seem to be, compared to old processors. I feel like my MotoX is probably about as a fast a multi-threaded Pentium 4(maybe 3ghz or so).

His S5 is obviously a lot snappier, but I wouldn't say it's even as powerful an old E8500 Core 2 Duo. It's impressive considering it's a phone and basically runs on no power, but it still feels like a ten year pc to me.

It's the main reason I thought the big push to tablets came years too soon. Because they've really only been powerful enough for mainstream appeal for maybe 3-4 years(when the big media blitz probably came almost ten years ago).

I don't think phones are ready to replace pcs or laptops. Probably not for another 5 years, minimum.

Where would you say these phones rank compared to dusty old PCs you'd expect to find laying around outside of Goodwill?

 

[ChronoReverse]

With this year's phones I'd say we're definitely past the Pentium 4 level even per core. For certain optimized tasks, beyond Core 2 even but that's more a because of design goals.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I would say modern phones compare reasonably well to low clocked Core 2 duos, at least in bursty, well threaded workloads. Once the phone throttles down, the Core 2 duo will pull ahead.

Graphics-wise, looking at old iGPUs (looking at you Intel GMA), modern phones brutalize them so badly I can hardly believe they were sticking those things in even high end laptops. My S800 phone has 10x the compute as the GMA 4500M that was in my old Core 2 Duo laptop.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Yeah, GPU's definitely far exceed integrated graphics. One area I'm glad for the mobile push.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Yeah, GPU's definitely far exceed integrated graphics. One area I'm glad for the mobile push.

I for one certainly did not predict Sandy Bridge to improve so much on iGPU performance. In a single night, Intel basically ate the bottom end dGPU market (the mmo and free to play type games). They went from hardly usable at all to being reasonably useful for light gaming.

 

[notposting]

I would say modern phones compare reasonably well to low clocked Core 2 duos, at least in bursty, well threaded workloads. Once the phone throttles down, the Core 2 duo will pull ahead.

Graphics-wise, looking at old iGPUs (looking at you Intel GMA), modern phones brutalize them so badly I can hardly believe they were sticking those things in even high end laptops. My S800 phone has 10x the compute as the GMA 4500M that was in my old Core 2 Duo laptop.

That's certainly an interesting part of the equation as well - the very low power "desktop" architecture parts had to compromise quite a bit, would be interesting as well to see some of these (the S810?) with plenty of power available and active cooling on it.

 

[Zodiark1593]

That's certainly an interesting part of the equation as well - the very low power "desktop" architecture parts had to compromise quite a bit, would be interesting as well to see some of these (the S810?) with plenty of power available and active cooling on it.

What I would like to see in smartphone reviews is a consistent performance benchmark. Yes, the phone is fast as hell stone cold, but how well does it bench after an hour or so of Prime95/Furmark style loads.

 

[JeffMD]

Here is some good posts on how to look at desktop and mobil CPUs.

http://superuser.com/questions/808776/whats-the-difference-between-mobile-and-desktop-processors

TL;dr , ghz and cores alone mean little, fabrication and TPU now play just as big a role and since 2-4 watt mobile processors are using up a fraction of the power desktop is, there is no comparison.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Here is some good posts on how to look at desktop and mobil CPUs.

http://superuser.com/questions/808776/whats-the-difference-between-mobile-and-desktop-processors

TL;dr , ghz and cores alone mean little, fabrication and TPU now play just as big a role and since 2-4 watt mobile processors are using up a fraction of the power desktop is, there is no comparison.

I would say at this point, this should already be known, of course, we're comparing to much older processors, not anything newer as we already know a 1.4 GHz Haswell will demolish anything in a tablet/phone.

That said, according to benches I ran between my G2 (SD800 @ 2.23 GHz quad) and my laptop (1st gen i5 @2.53 GHz dual), at best, the phone scores approximately half compared to the laptop. It would probably be safe to say that all four krait cores combined and unthrottled are worth about 1 i5 (1st gen) core.

 

[poofyhairguy]

By benchmarks I have done my iPad Air 2's GPU is pretty my equal to a GT 430. The CPU beats a 2011 MBA in single and multicore:

http://daringfireball.net/2014/10/ipad_air_2

Last gen Qualcomm stuff had a low IPC compared to that, but hopefully their next gen (post generic ARM) will be more Apple-like. Nvidia kinda let me down in that quest.

 

[Zodiark1593]

By benchmarks I have done my iPad Air 2's GPU is pretty my equal to a GT 430. The CPU beats a 2011 MBA in single and multicore:

http://daringfireball.net/2014/10/ipad_air_2

Last gen Qualcomm stuff had a low IPC compared to that, but hopefully their next gen (post generic ARM) will be more Apple-like. Nvidia kinda let me down in that quest.

Ha, back when the Apple A7 launched in the iPhone 5s, the only vender that wasn't completely caught with their pants down was Qualcomm, though it still took a >1 GHz clock speed advantage to even compare with a 1.2 GHz Cyclone core, (a 2+ GHz Cortex A15 can probably do the job, though at much higher power consumption.)

 

[poofyhairguy]

Ha, back when the Apple A7 launched in the iPhone 5s, the only vender that wasn't completely caught with their pants down was Qualcomm, though it still took a >1 GHz clock speed advantage to even compare with a 1.2 GHz Cyclone core, (a 2+ GHz Cortex A15 can probably do the job, though at much higher power consumption.)

Qualcomm was certainly caught with its pants down. It never predicted mobile SoCs to go to 64bit that soon, in fact a top executives got fired over it and their roadmap got shifted around in a big way. The whole 810 issue is due to it being a last minute SoC made of highend ARM parts that Qualcomm had little experience with. That 5s is why we have a so-so (outside of the S6 because they make their own SoC) Android phone market in 2016.

 

[JeffMD]

I'm sorry... why is 64bit cpus needed if the devices still don't go over 3 gigs of ram? I don't think anyone got fired over that. -_-

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'm sorry... why is 64bit cpus needed if the devices still don't go over 3 gigs of ram? I don't think anyone got fired over that. -_-

Ok technically he resigned:

http://www.cnet.com/news/after-apple-64-bit-a7-criticism-qualcomm-exec-reassigned/

Close enough.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Ha, back when the Apple A7 launched in the iPhone 5s, the only vender that wasn't completely caught with their pants down was Qualcomm, though it still took a >1 GHz clock speed advantage to even compare with a 1.2 GHz Cyclone core, (a 2+ GHz Cortex A15 can probably do the job, though at much higher power consumption.)

The IPC in itself isn't that important. You can have a cpu with 10x the IPC of Cyclone but only 1% the clock speed and it'll be much slower (extreme but obvious example).

Qualcomm's design was meant to go to higher clocks. It's not coincidence that the ultimate performance wasn't bad at all per core even with Android's overhead compared to iOS.

Cyclone and up are definitely very nice designs though.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Qualcomm was certainly caught with its pants down. It never predicted mobile SoCs to go to 64bit that soon, in fact a top executives got fired over it and their roadmap got shifted around in a big way. The whole 810 issue is due to it being a last minute SoC made of highend ARM parts that Qualcomm had little experience with. That 5s is why we have a so-so (outside of the S6 because they make their own SoC) Android phone market in 2016.

I didn't say they weren't completely surprised, no doubt Apple's 64-bit move made some engineers and executives over there sweat bullets, however my point being they were in a much better position than even Samsung in regards to keeping Android SOCs competitive, in major part, thanks to the engineers behind Krait for building in massive clock speed headroom. Were it not for that, Apple would have a major battery life advantage over Android phones as OEMs would resort to using the Cortex-A15 in high clocked configs instead to maintain performance parity.

 

[Oyeve]

Its amazing in that the average smartphone is more powerful by 10000000000x anything that flew the Apollo 11 missions.

 

[sm625]

When you have competent engineers writing code, you can get a lot done with little power. When you have idiots writing code, you can spend millions of lines of code and trillions of cpu cycles and still not have a GUI that scrolls and animates smoothly.