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There have been a few articles recently about whether SoCs for mobile devices need to scale beyond a certain core count. One side says that 8 cores and above i

There have been a few articles recently about whether SoCs for mobile devices need to scale beyond a certain core count. One side says that 8 cores and above is overkill and that building highly scalable dual- and quad-core processors is the way forward: http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2015/05/11/why-8-cpu-cores-in-smartphones-are-a-bad-idea-an-auto-industry-lesson/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2015/05/11/why-8... Another side says that more cores offer more granularity for workloads and that we shouldn't be afraid to move to 10- or 12-core processors: http://www.androidauthority.com/why-8-and-10-cpu-cores-in-smartphones-are-a-good-idea-607894/ http://www.androidauthority.com/why-8-and-10-cpu-cores-in-sm... I tend to be in the first camp so I've linked to an article I wrote on the topic. It would be interesting to see what others here think.

yaantc 11y ago
I note that companies who design their own cores (Apple, Qualcomm) tend to stick to a limited number of intermediate cores. Only companies tied to ARM implementations went the big.LITTLE way, the one that leads to more cores. And most struggle with the power consumption of the big cores. The way I look at b.L is that ARM leveraged their dominant position in mobile to prepare the ground for their entry in servers. The A15, then A57 and A72 and a bit too big for a mobile. To make them acceptable, there is b.L and more cores. Apple and QCOM (with the Scorpion and Krait, not for chips where they reuse ARM cores as is) made cores not as fast as the big ARM implementations, but still very good. They're closer to the A12 and A17 from ARM, which arrived after the A15 but are 32 bits so no longer attractive. I would guess that once the A57/A72 are paid for, then a middle-of-the-ground ARM implementation in the spirit of the A17 but 64 bits will come. That's what I'd like in my phone, and no need for a zillion cores for me.

yaantc 11y ago

I note that companies who design their own cores (Apple, Qualcomm) tend to stick to a limited number of intermediate cores. Only companies tied to ARM implementations went the big.LITTLE way, the one that leads to more cores. And most struggle with the power consumption of the big cores. The way I look at b.L is that ARM leveraged their dominant position in mobile to prepare the ground for their entry in servers. The A15, then A57 and A72 and a bit too big for a mobile. To make them acceptable, there is b.L and more cores. Apple and QCOM (with the Scorpion and Krait, not for chips where they reuse ARM cores as is) made cores not as fast as the big ARM implementations, but still very good. They're closer to the A12 and A17 from ARM, which arrived after the A15 but are 32 bits so no longer attractive. I would guess that once the A57/A72 are paid for, then a middle-of-the-ground ARM implementation in the spirit of the A17 but 64 bits will come. That's what I'd like in my phone, and no need for a zillion cores for me.