Camera Launching

I wanted also to have a closer look at CPU behaviour while using the phone's camera. First off, we start off by analyzing what happens when we launch the camera application.

Nothing much to report on the little cores, we only see some minor load on a couple of threads while the camera is running.

Most of the work when launching the camera was done by the big cluster. Here we see all 4 cores jumping into action. It's interesting to see that at these smaller time-scales we can observe how the CPU frequency lags behind the actual load on the cluster, as the frequency governor maintains a higher frequency for some time before falling back to the idle 800MHz.

Samsung seems to be able to parallelize well the camera application as this is again a sensible scenario that makes good usage of the 4.4 big.LITTLE topology of the SoC.

App: Play Store App Updates Camera: Still Snapshot
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  • Gigaplex - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link

    An interesting and thorough analysis, although I'm concerned at some of the assumptions made in some of the conclusions. Just because a queue of 4 threads makes all the 8 big.LITTLE cores active doesn't mean that the architecture is effective. For all we know, the threads are thrashing back and forth, draining precious performance per watt.
  • darkich - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link

    Andrei, your articles are in a league of their own. Thanks for the great work
  • melgross - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link

    I'm still not convinced. The fact that it's doing what it does on these chips doesn't mean that their performance is as good as it could be, or that power efficiency is as good. We really need to see two to four core designs, with cores that are really more powerful, to make a proper comparison. We don't have that with the chips tested.
  • blackcrayon - Thursday, October 8, 2015 - link

    Exactly. It should at least show a design with a small number of powerful cores. Obviously with Apple's A series chips you have the issue of dealing with a different operating system underneath, but can't they use a Tegra K1 or something?
  • Hydrargyrum - Friday, September 25, 2015 - link

    The stacked frequency distribution graphs would be a *lot* easier to read if you used a consistent range of different saturations/intensities of a single colour (e.g. go from bright=fast to dark=slow), or a single pass from red to blue through the ROYGBIV colour spectrum (e.g. red=fast, blue=slow), to represent the range of frequencies.

    By going around the colour wheel multiple times in the colour coding it's *really* hard to tell whether a given area of the graph is high or low frequency. The difference in colour between 1400/800, 1296/700, and 1200/600 are very subtle to say the least.
  • Ethos Evoss - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    anandtech always uses weird non-popular words on its own site type ''heterogeneous '' never heard in my life and even usa or uk ppl have to search in cambridge/oxford dictionary :DDD
    Immediately u can say it is DEFO NOT USA or UK website.. They do not use such difficult words AT ALL :)
  • Ethos Evoss - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link

    ANd mainly they use when it comes to china products .. like mediatek or kirin or big.little topic etc..
    This site is DEVOURED or we could say powered by apple.inc :)

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