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I somehow expected a ton of conversation around the new A10 Fusion chip. After 340+ comments I couldn't find any mention of it (I just did a page search for A10

by srikz 10y ago

I somehow expected a ton of conversation around the new A10 Fusion chip. After 340+ comments I couldn't find any mention of it (I just did a page search for A10, A10 Fusion). Apple were already ahead with their per-core performance but seems like they have widened the gap even further this time with their version of the big.LITTLE arrangement. Wonder how Qualcomm's next chips will be. From what I heard, 820 will be the last custom chip they will do and from now on the CPU will be just the reference ARM chips and they will focus on the GPU and better integration of radios on the chip. Someone with more knowledge (about Apple's and Qualcomm's chip) please fill in.

epberry 10y ago
I would be surprised if Qualcomm only did reference designs after the 820. They were forced to switch to the reference 64 bit ARM design after Apple leapfrogged mobile chipmakers and it really hurt them. They had a lot of trouble with the big.LITTLE architecture and power management which led to 810 power issues which somewhat led to Samsung dropping them for the S6. With the 820 Qualcomm was able to make their own custom cores (I think they went with 2 or 4 instead of 8) and generally overcome the 810 trainwreck. Qualcomm's ability to integrate the radio, GPU, DSP, crypto chip and some other things with a custom CPU into a true SOC is really a massive advantage within mobile and I expect them to build on that with more custom designs. One last note about big.LITTLE. It seems like a panacea - just move all the big jobs to the big processors and the little ones to the little processors, yay! But this is much, much harder in practice. Doing this wrong leads to disastrous UX, screen tears because rendering shifts off of the big cores being one prime example. Process scheduling is already very tough and current schedulers are the result of many years of experimentation and heuristic best practices. Of course Apple controls the whole stack (i.e. they don't need to worry about where Kernel maintainers want to go with the schedulers) and I'm sure they have some amazing engineers working on Darwin so maybe they were able to overcome problems here. If you can schedule correctly it does seem like a big power savings win. But (and I may be behind the times here) that is a big if...
- srikz 10y ago
  Even I feel that by not doing custom designs they will be consumed by lower priced competition like Mediatek. This piece of info was by someone who claimed works/worked at Qualcomm so I didn't dismiss it initially. We will probably know about it by end of the year.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Well at least for screen renders you can make sure render threads stay on the big cores and with GCD you can use thread priorities to determine what to put on which core. iOS has concepts of active/inactive and is mostly a one-app-at-a-time os. They also have a well defined background processing modes and extension API. With all of this structure, I don't think it will be as hard as we think it will be.
dgregd 10y ago
Probably performance of A8 for most of people is good enough. At least for native apps.
- simonh 10y ago
  Right now I'm sure you are correct, I have a 6+ and it's performance is fine, but things change. OS and application demands are only going to increase, the new architecture may well provide higher power efficiency and thus better battery life. Finally we don't know what other hardware tricks the processor and it's supporting chipset implement. In the last few processor cycles Apple has been adding hardware functionality to support specific device features such as security, image processing audio signal processing and motion/position tracking so it's not all just about the raw performance.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by srikz 10y ago

epberry 10y ago

I would be surprised if Qualcomm only did reference designs after the 820. They were forced to switch to the reference 64 bit ARM design after Apple leapfrogged mobile chipmakers and it really hurt them. They had a lot of trouble with the big.LITTLE architecture and power management which led to 810 power issues which somewhat led to Samsung dropping them for the S6. With the 820 Qualcomm was able to make their own custom cores (I think they went with 2 or 4 instead of 8) and generally overcome the 810 trainwreck. Qualcomm's ability to integrate the radio, GPU, DSP, crypto chip and some other things with a custom CPU into a true SOC is really a massive advantage within mobile and I expect them to build on that with more custom designs. One last note about big.LITTLE. It seems like a panacea - just move all the big jobs to the big processors and the little ones to the little processors, yay! But this is much, much harder in practice. Doing this wrong leads to disastrous UX, screen tears because rendering shifts off of the big cores being one prime example. Process scheduling is already very tough and current schedulers are the result of many years of experimentation and heuristic best practices. Of course Apple controls the whole stack (i.e. they don't need to worry about where Kernel maintainers want to go with the schedulers) and I'm sure they have some amazing engineers working on Darwin so maybe they were able to overcome problems here. If you can schedule correctly it does seem like a big power savings win. But (and I may be behind the times here) that is a big if...

srikz 10y ago
Even I feel that by not doing custom designs they will be consumed by lower priced competition like Mediatek. This piece of info was by someone who claimed works/worked at Qualcomm so I didn't dismiss it initially. We will probably know about it by end of the year.
mahyarm 10y ago
Well at least for screen renders you can make sure render threads stay on the big cores and with GCD you can use thread priorities to determine what to put on which core. iOS has concepts of active/inactive and is mostly a one-app-at-a-time os. They also have a well defined background processing modes and extension API. With all of this structure, I don't think it will be as hard as we think it will be.

dgregd 10y ago

Probably performance of A8 for most of people is good enough. At least for native apps.

simonh 10y ago
Right now I'm sure you are correct, I have a 6+ and it's performance is fine, but things change. OS and application demands are only going to increase, the new architecture may well provide higher power efficiency and thus better battery life. Finally we don't know what other hardware tricks the processor and it's supporting chipset implement. In the last few processor cycles Apple has been adding hardware functionality to support specific device features such as security, image processing audio signal processing and motion/position tracking so it's not all just about the raw performance.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]