TI: Dual-Core OMAP5 Faster Than Quad-Core Cortex A9

[victorious 3930k]

Has anyone thought that the Tegra 3 might be using the Ninja Core, plus one core?

 

[saturnus]

[citation][nom]victorious 3930k[/nom]Has anyone thought that the Tegra 3 might be using the Ninja Core, plus one core?[/citation]

Since the ninja core cannot be powered on at the same time as any of it's 4 other cores, the question makes no sense.

 

[victorious 3930k]

[citation][nom]saturnus[/nom]Since the ninja core cannot be powered on at the same time as any of it's 4 other cores, the question makes no sense.[/citation]
Two things:
■ It never said it was using the 4 cores, it could've just as easily have been using the Ninja Core, which would've contributed to the sluggishness.
■ Look at the top comment in YT:

Can't you guys see? The Quad-core one running Android 3 vs OMAP 5 one running Android 4 ?!

 

[razor512]

Few things I want to bring up.

If the dual core OMAP 5 is faster than the competing quad core, then why not take the CAD file for the OMAP 5, then select the 2 cores, and do a quick Ctrl + C, and a quick Ctrl + V?


Also, not many programs for mobile devices are able to use 4 threads (most programs are single threaded, with a select few being able to offload certain tasks to the additional cores)

The main area where 4 cores helps with is gaming, and multitasking (though multitasking is harder to do on a device with 512MB or 1GB of RAM)

While quad core can be great, currently the applications have not caught up since most devices are single core (with very few being dual core), and now quad core has come out.

SO it is not that the CPU is overall faster, it just means that it has 2 fast cores, instead of 4 slower cores that total up to higher overall performance when all 4 cores get to work together on a single task.

The main reason for it is power efficiency, with many core technologies, power usage grows faster than performance. (eg you may see a single core technology run at 95 watts, then a higher end version that uses 125 watts but only performs a little bit faster, so instead of delving into rapid growth in power consumption for small performance increases on a single core, you take the more efficient cores and keep them at the same speed and just add more of them).

 

[Guest]

dual cores for phone. quad cores for tablet. It make more sense. It is kinda scary to walk around with really powerful battery in your jean pocket. Hopefully it won't explode.

 

[hannibal]

Well the same situation as with desktop... Is dual core enough compared to hexacore in desktop... Allmost allways... Will the situation be the same in few years to come... maybe not if everything goes as we hope...
The best part of multi core is the ability to scale up and down in power and power usage by using one, two, three, four, five... cores when needed and putting all the rest in deep sleep, or completely shut them down. The problem is that there are so few aplication at this moment that can use more than even one core.

 

[vilenjan]

Quad cores processes are just barely hitting their prime in mainstream desktops, and even here dual cores still very well. Quad cores in smartphones are a marketing gimmick. When I compare my single core galaxy s1 phone to a friends dual core galaxy s2 phone, in average use, there little to no difference, so that point of quad cores eludes me completely. I hope dual core A15 phones become the new super phone standard as apposed to qaud A9 phones.

 

[freggo]

I'm usually in favor of 'more' when it comes to IT gear; but quad cores in a phone seems to me like a bit of overkill. Do people realy do that much surfing, gaming or whatever on those tiny screens ?
I can see the headline in a few years... declining eye sight in majority of population are linked to cell phone usage.

 

[DRosencraft]

Applications have the be written to use multiple cores period, they don't just come that way just because they are installed on a machine that has multiple cores. When you talking about a 90 minute movie, it is still a 90 minute movie. Having faster hardware does not change that or more cores does not make a 90 minute move playback faster. However the encoding software used to create the movie will finish faster as those applications are written to be multi-threaded and they can spread the work around as you mentioned. Resolution processing will occur on the core designated for use with a single threaded application. That is why if you look at the task manager you will see allot of tops uneven distribution of utilization across all cores in the system. If you have a Video applications running, you will see one core with higher utilization and the other cores sitting at almost idle.

I used to do allot with firewall performance testing where we did some tweaking of the applications affinity to the cores manually because of the way it distributed processing as flows went through the system. Properly configured we could do a 140Gbs of Firewall performance with 1500 byte packets with 10,000 new connections per second. Without the tweaks we where getting some 3 getting loaded up to 100% utilization while the other 9 cores where sitting at 50% or less.

Hardware advancements are not just about bragging rights. There is a market for the higher end parts, and servers and pro workstations regularly use applications that leverage the extra cores. But we are not talking about Pro Workstations or Servers, we are talking about Phones. A little different. Even the Games that we play on our computers are really just starting to take advantage of quad core processors. Supreme Commander was one of the first although it did a crappy job of it unless you used the Core balancer application.

You've restated my point, which is that there can be a use for multi-core/multi-threaded programs, but there are few programs made to take advantage of that technology. As you said, even video can benefit, but it's not really needed there all that much. It's not something anyone is going to see all that easily comparing one device to another. Is it something you can benchmark? Sure, but most people aren't going to be satisfied staring at benchmarks if it doesn't translate to visible performance change. Yes, servers and workstations do use multi-core/threading, but again, average consumers are not seeing that benefit. I will not dimish the utility of multi-threading serves to workstations. My brother will be upgrading his rig to the 16-core Interlagos soon because all those cores are a blessing in rendering 3d models, which is his business. But, he resisted until now because that PC is also his predominent average use computer, and it is almost a complete waste having that many cores when 90% of the time he won't be using any of it.

So I will restate my point; until software developers make programs that can actually use at least a significant amount of these cores, the rapid advancement in multi-core processor technology is being wasted.

 

[del35]

Have experienced first hand that some programs will run a lot faster in a single core processor than in a
quad core or multicore one. I attribute this to programming that does not take advantage of the multicore capabilities of the processor.

 

[Misdissident]

Reminds me of when the Pre3's specs were released.

There was the whole "OMG LOL SINGLE CORE PHONE VS NEW DUAL COREPHONES WEBOS HARWADRE STILL YEARS BEHIND" ordeal flailing around with the usual disregard of how vital single thread processing speed was to almost all mobile OS experiences... I'd still rather have a great 1.4ghz single core processor in a phone than junky dual cores at 1ghz. Quad core just makes that more ridiculous.

 

[Cazalan]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]soon we will have a mobile os platform, and the phone will be the power.imagine a dock that you plug the phone into, and up comes a full widows looking os on a 1920x1080 screen, with a keyboard and mouse in front of you. you take it out of the dock and pocket it, and there its now your phone againyou take it on a plane with a laptop body, plug it where the touch pad would be, and congrats, you now have a laptop...power increases in phones are leading up to this kind of computer experience. [/citation]

Yes it's called the Asus Padfone. 😉

 

[Cazalan]

The OMAP 5 actually has 4 ARM cores. Look at the pictures from TI website.

Some trickery going on there, but in general yes a dual A15 is supposed to outperform a quad-A9.

They're also lagging by 6-9 months on volume shipments at which time NVidia will have Tegra4 which is also A15 based.

http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12864&contentId=103103

 

[photonboy]

efficiency:
One issue I've noted is that company's will show how much more "efficient" their product is. While it may be true, they may then simply use a smaller battery.

I don't care about "efficiency" in a mobile device. I care about battery life.

 

[seravi]

[citation][nom]razor512[/nom]Few things I want to bring up.If the dual core OMAP 5 is faster than the competing quad core, then why not take the CAD file for the OMAP 5, then select the 2 cores, and do a quick Ctrl + C, and a quick Ctrl + V?[/citation]

Hi, to answer your question
- Processor are planned 2 years ago (since they're testing the chip now), so one cannot "simple" copy and paste.

- So why didn't they planned 4 core 2 years ago? - there are quite a few things to consider:
Ignoring pushes like market demand, competitions, etc, we must be aware that with 4 cores comes:
+ Cost of designing hardware that can make the 4 cores work together
+ A way to pack 4 cores in the smallest space possible (again an increase in cost compared to 2 core)
+ Design test program and actual tests that can test all the millions of transistors (note: cost of test often consist of 70% the total cost of producing a chip - including planning, designing and actual manufacturing)
+ And many more ...

I hope that somewhat answered your question

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]if the applications are not written to take advantage of all the cores it does not matter how many cores you have....it's a fact...just look at how it was when the 64bit and multi core cpus came out....at first they were useless, after the developers started to write code to take advantage of the hardware they really started to shine[/citation]

All 64 bit x86 CPUs are 32 bit compatible so no they were never useless and multicore CPUs are the same, they can run single threaded work too so still not useless. They didn't shine until developers optimized for them, but they were never useless.

[citation][nom]hannibal[/nom]Well the same situation as with desktop... Is dual core enough compared to hexacore in desktop... Allmost allways... Will the situation be the same in few years to come... maybe not if everything goes as we hope...The best part of multi core is the ability to scale up and down in power and power usage by using one, two, three, four, five... cores when needed and putting all the rest in deep sleep, or completely shut them down. The problem is that there are so few aplication at this moment that can use more than even one core.[/citation]

Define enough. Also, the only six and eight core desktop CPUs that most people can afford are garbage compared to Intel's quad core chips so it's a moot point, unless you do some work that can use that many threads. Six core is often not enough for gaming systems, yet the quad core is, so defining a CPU by it's core count is wrong.

For any application that can not utilize as many cores as is available, the performance of each core that can be used by the application is more important than adding cores. Also, all of you idiots complaining about power usage of a quad core chip are wrong. They use about the same amount of power as the dual core chips, often they use less.

When more powerful CPUs are created they are built to be in the same or a lower power profile than the previous generation that they replace.

We have single, dual, and quad core phones. There is software that uses more than one thread the amount of such software will undoubtedly grow. Of course we would prefer a dual core with 200% performance per core instead of a quad core that has 100% or even 125% or so, but the quad core will be more useful over time if you don't already do things with it.

Android is a very well threaded OS and Google will undoubtedly want developers to utilize as many threads as possible so we might see the Android platform improve on thread utilization faster than Windows software (seriously? How long have we had multiple cores, almost 10 years or so, yet most software is still single threaded).

As of right now, most people may find it difficult to fully utilize a quad core CPU in a smart phone. A dual core with the same or slightly higher performance per core? That's a lot easier. In a year? We will probably be able to fully load the same Tegra 3 and other such quad core CPUs pretty easily and then we will be glad we had them. I don't replace my phone every year and I don't know many people that do, so it seems pretty reasonable to get a phone that will be better than it's current competition later on.

[citation][nom]Misdissident[/nom]Reminds me of when the Pre3's specs were released.There was the whole "OMG LOL SINGLE CORE PHONE VS NEW DUAL COREPHONES WEBOS HARWADRE STILL YEARS BEHIND" ordeal flailing around with the usual disregard of how vital single thread processing speed was to almost all mobile OS experiences... I'd still rather have a great 1.4ghz single core processor in a phone than junky dual cores at 1ghz. Quad core just makes that more ridiculous.[/citation]

A quad core that can go to 1.2GHz seems better than a 1.4GHz dual core and a 1.5GHz single core, all being the same or a similarly performing architecture. Now if that dual core has significantly more IPC than the quad core, then the tables turn, or if the single core has even more, but those are less likely scenarios.

Besides all of this, we have 1.5GHz dual core A9 chips and the Tegra 3 runs at 1.3GHz and can turbo to 1.4GHz so complaining about only 1GHz speeds is pointless.

An A9 quad is not as good as an A15 dual in that sense, but when the two CPUs being compared are the same architecture, the quad is probably the better choice. Furthermore, the quads will often have improved graphics over the duals so there is more to consider than just the CPU portion of each chip.

 

[photonboy]

IGNORE THIS ARTICLE:

Articles like this are too vague, and quite frankly start too much misinformation. While some of the information is definitely true, we need to see a COMPLETE comparison of:
1) different software,
2) Power efficiency (i.e. battery life)
3) cost (money)

It's just a little too vague.

 

[seravi]

Perhaps the next quad core would do better.

 

[blazorthon]

Also, is it just me being stupid or do companies love to compare their hardware with other hardware that uses an outdated version of Android with their own hardware suing an updated version? It seems to be common practice.

 

[photonboy]

My first phone had a black and white screen (calculator style) and was EASIER TO USE than anything on the market today. Sure, it couldn't play videos, but I could get to speed dial WITHOUT LOOKING!!

How about a phone that is JUST A PHONE? ( guess "JAP" is a poor acronym)

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]photonboy[/nom]My first phone had a black and white screen (calculator style) and was EASIER TO USE than anything on the market today. Sure, it couldn't play videos, but I could get to speed dial WITHOUT LOOKING!!How about a phone that is JUST A PHONE? ( guess "JAP" is a poor acronym)[/citation]

I think that This is a Phone (TP for short) would be worse.