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
S-Browser - AnandTech Frontpage
Again staying with the S-Browser, we check the behaviour of just pure web-page rendering. This time we load the AnandTech front-page without scrolling through the page. The page is slightly heavier as we have more graphical elements as opposed to text on the previous article page.
This time around, we a more even distribution of the load on the little cores. Again, most of the 4 CPU cores are active and have threads placed onto them, averaging about 2.5 fully loaded cores.
The frequency distribution is much more variable in this scenario, as the cluster makes wide usage of the frequency range available to itself. On the power state distribution chart we see that most CPUs are still able to enter their power-gating states, indicating that we're mostly handling very short bursty loads.
The biges cores seems much less loaded in this scenario, as most of the time except for a small peak we only have 1 large thread loading the cluster. Because of this, we expect the other cores to be shut down and if we look at the power state distribution we guessed correctly.
The total amount of threads on the system doesn't change much compared to the previous scenario: The S-Browser still manages to actively make good use of up to 4 cores with the occasional burst of up to 5 threads.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
157 Comments
View All Comments
lilmoe - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
"if the interest is high enough":/ Really?
zaza - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
Yes Please. It would be nice to see if the same or similar tests works on snaprdagon 810,801 and 615 and Mediatek chips, and intel SoCerchni - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link
A follow-up with synthetic would be quite interesting.aryonoco - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
I just wanted to reiterate the point here an thank the author for this great piece of technical investigative journalism.Andrei, thank you for this work. It is hugely invaluable and insightful.
tipoo - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Very interesting article. Seems like the mantra of "more cores on mobile are just marketing" was wrong in terms of Android, seems to dip into both four core big and little clusters pretty well. That puts the single thread performance having lagged behind the Apple A series (up until the S6 at least) in a new light, since it can in fact use the full multicore performance.tipoo - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
*That is, barring gaming. More core Android functions do well with multithreading though.jjj - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
In gaming there is a big advantage. By using mostly the small cores you allow for more TDP to go to the GPU. One more relevant thing would console ports in the next couple of years when mobile GPUs will catch up with consoles. The current consoles have 8 small cores and that fits just right with many small cores in Android.retrospooty - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Not really sure whos "mantra" that was. People that don't understand what the big.little architecture is like some angry Apple fans?tipoo - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Well sure, whoever they were, but it was a pretty common refrain for every 8 core SoC.soccerballtux - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
for one, it was my mantra. I liked having 4 cores because 2 wasn't enough, but according to my hotplugging times, I only really need 3 for optimal experience most of the time