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Joined: 11 May 2006
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 Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2015 4:00 pm Post subject: The Mobile CPU Core-Count Debate: Analyzing The Real World |
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<p>Over the last 5 years the mobile space has seen a dramatic change in terms of performance of smartphone and tablet SoCs. The industry has seen a move from single-core to dual-core to quad-core processors to today’s heterogeneous 6-10 core designs. This was a natural evolution similar to what the PC space has seen in the last decade, but only in a much more accelerated pace. While ILP (Instruction-level parallelism) has certainly also gone up with each new processor architecture, with designs such as ARM’s Cortex A15 or Apple’s Cyclone processor cores brining significant single-threaded performance boosts, it’s the increase of CPU cores that has brought the most simple way of increasing overall computing power.</p>
<p>This increasing of CPU cores brought up many discussions about just how much sense such designs make in real-world usages. I can still remember when the first quad-cores were introduced that users were arguing the benefit of 4 cores in mobile workloads and that these increases were just done for the sake of marketing. I can draw parallels between those discussions from a few years ago and today’s arguments about 6 to 10-core SoCs based on big.LITTLE.</p>
<p>While there have been some attempts to analyse the core-count debate, I was never really satisfied with the methodology and results of these pieces. The existing tools for monitoring CPUs just don’t cut it when it comes to accurately analysing the fine-grained events that dictate the management of multi-core and heterogeneous CPUs. To try to finally have a proper analysis of the situation, for this article, I’ve tried to approach this issue from the ground up, and not relying on any third-party tools.</p>
<p align="center"><img src='http://dynamic1.anandtech.com/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=24&cb=1916742040&n=a1f2f01f' border='0' alt='' /> </p>
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Source: AnandTech
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