Android Why does my Android phone have more cores and more RAM than my PC/ laptop?
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cute.bandar
Adept
One word: Marketing
Most people will make impulse decisions; 3.1 Ghz CPU > 2.7 Ghz CPU ; more cores therefore faster.
Most people will make impulse decisions; 3.1 Ghz CPU > 2.7 Ghz CPU ; more cores therefore faster.
Far from it.
If an SoC with big.LITTLE architecture has 6 or 8 crores, then there will be two sets of cores each with their own power and performance profile. You don't need a blazing fast CPU to handle normal UI. During that time, a low performance lower power core will be used to save battery. When running a game, high performance cores will be used.
In earlier iterations of this technology, only either of low performance or high performance cores used to be active. So technically even if it has 8 cores, practically, only at most 4 cores can be used. In the latest iterations, this has also been remedied. Depending on the task, any Combination of cores can be used.
The Mediatek Helios X20 is a 10 Core SoC that extended the big.LITTLE by having 3 sets of cores for low, medium and high performance needs.
There is also the alternative where they pack a big number of only low power cores to make mid end SoC.
While advertising can be misleading to the novice, there is real meaningful technology behind the scenes.
Calling it a race for specs or marketing is just absurd. We have already hit a wall in how much a single monolithic CPU can handle.
Increasing count of cores and building packing in specialized cores is the way forward.
Yes, there will be some hurdles the biggest one of which is that the software is not catching up fast enough, but that is not the hardware developers fault. It is sheer laziness from programmers that we have software that does not use the hardware well enough.
Same holds for RAM as well. While one part of the problem is that software is not being optimized well enough, No amount of RAM is too much for a computer. Having more RAM simply means that you can have more stuff running. Smartphones are running desktop class operating systems. Android is Linux. iOS may have Apple imposed constraints, but remove those constraints and its still Free/Open BSD kernel.
The earliest PC's that I used in 1992 had a 5 MHz 8088 CPU and 32kB RAM.
The first PC that I bought in 1996 had a whooping 166 MHz CPU and 16 MB of RAM
The first smart phone that I had in 2004 had a 156 MHz ARM CPU and 64 MB RAM
The PC that I built back in 2011 and using to this day has 3.3 GHz quad core GPU and and 16 GB RAM.
The smartphone that I use today has 2.5 GHz quad core CPU and 3 GB RAM
Regardless of optimization and all, the kind of things that I run on my phone today is desktop computer class stuff. I personally felt many times that my phone would have been better with more RAM. So would it be surprising that newer phones will pack in 4 or 6 GB RAM?
goDofWar_skr
Adept
Few other uses which I think could benefit from the higher specs are :-
- x265 transcoding/playback
- photo editing
- better graphical games
- multitasking
cute.bandar
Adept
I have a desktop with 4GB RAM and my it runs like a dream with IDE's and browsers / server /db server all running. What precisely do you 'do' on your phone that makes you feel 3GB is less for your phone? Just curious..
I've always wondered if desktop processors and mobile processors are directly comparable in terms of their processing power. I mean, if a processor is clocked at 2 GHz, does it mean that it is the same in terms of power regardless of whether it is from a mobile or a PC? I guess not, 'coz then we would already be looking at using mobile processors for PCs for their power efficiency and compact form factor.
cute.bandar
Adept
Also,I think there are 2 parts to this question:
1. Why do phone manufacturres try to sell phone with large RAM and more cores. The answer for this is simply marketing. Manufacturers don't gave a shit about things like battery life, performance, laginess etc . Remember android 2.3 phones with 256MB RAM, they had a lot less in terms of specs and lasted 2-4 days in battery life and performed a lot of the 15 year desktop-class stuff!
2. if you are asking Why do you need a powerful mobile. Right now I personally don't see many applications, mostly because mobile cpu's aren't powerful if compared to desktop - Look at this comparison
but going forward, VR/AR are going to be HUGE and they'll probably need all the processing power and pixels you can give them.
They are obviously completely different breeds of CPU's. Desktop CPU's are made to perform without severe limitations on power consumption and thermals too can be controlled through heat sinks and all. Mobile CPU's have to operate at low power specs and thermals to have to be controlled at a moderate level to be able to operate a device while holding in hand without having elaborate heat dissipation mechanisms given the compact form factors. These represent two different solutions optimized for different problems. Further more the architecture itself is entirely different. What they do in a single clock cycle is entirely different. So, clock speed is not a criteria for comparison at all.
As an example, my phone has a Snapdragon 801 which is Quad Core CPU operating at 2.5 GHz. In Antutu, this SoC scores about 42k. In fact, even the more recent SD810 scores 52k odd. The top of the line Exynos 7420 in the Samsung S6 has 8 cores in big.LITTLE configuration and a top of the line mobile GPU scores 65k.
My Surface Pro 4 has a Core i5 6300U Dual Core CPU operating at 2.4 GHz. This is an ultra lower series CPU that severely compromises on performance in favor of less power consumption and meant for tablets and ultra books. I run Android on it via virtualization (AMI DuOS). This is basically Android running on a Virtual machine on top of Windows 10 Pro. In Antutu running on Android, My Surface Pro scores over 67k. This is a dual core ultra low power CPU with an integrated low end GPU (my desktop standards) trumping some of the best Mobile SoC regardless of clock speed and core count while running inside a virtual machine on top a full fledged desktop OS.
^^ Yeah. Just as I guessed. Thanks for the explanation.
