The Mobile CPU Core-Count Debate: Analyzing The Real World
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 1, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- CPUs
- Mobile
- SoCs
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.
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nightbringer57 - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Very interesting article, much more favourable to multi-core designs than I would have thought.Each article page must have cost an insane amount of time. However, I still feel like some more information could have been useful. This article is geared towards real-world use cases, but I think it would be interesting to repeat this analysis on a few commonly-used benchmarking apps. I feel like this would be interesting to compare them to real-world uses and may help understanding the results.
ingwe - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Yes that would be very interesting. I am always curious about how synthetics actually compare to more real world applications.Azethoth - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Every single synthetic I have ever seen vastly exaggerates the benefit. I would be interested in an actual real world use case that actually matches a synthetic. It would blow my mind if there are any.Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
I'll do a follow-up pipeline on this if the interest is high enough.bug77 - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
High enough +1.Please do the follow-up.
tipoo - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
I'd definitely be interested.Drumsticks - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Yes! This would be neat. Also, great article!ThisIsChrisKim - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Yes, Would love a follow-up.HanakoIkezawa - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
I'm not sure of the practicality, but I would love to see a follow-up with Denver k1 and the A8X to see how lower core count out of order and in order SoCs are handled.This seriously was a fantastic article Andrei!
kspirit - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Yes please! +1