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
Reddit Sync Launch
Reddit Sync is one of many third-party reddit applications. A large amount of similar content-readers who display content via custom interfaces instead of full-fledged HTML websites should behave similarly in their CPU load.
The little cores don't look to have significant load put on them. We only ever see about 2 threads of constant load, with some short spikes were all 4 CPUs are loaded on medium capacity.
The moment the app is loaded all threads migrate onto the big cores for maximum performance. We also see some usage on the big cores when loading the content, but again, the actual number of CPUs used is rather limited as there is only ever about 1 big thread in use.
Overall the app launch doesn't seem to take much advantage of advanced multi-threading as we just manage to peak at 3 threads in the run-queue.
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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