What makes nexus 10 cpu better than a quad core?

[anon(847090)]

IMO, Android is not even using the full potential of Nexus 10's CPU/GPU. most probably due to drivers.
next update is going to be a blast

 

[anon62607]

In terms of architectural sophistication krait is somewhat superior to A15, I have no idea what benchmarks say about it though. They are very close though, krait has a shorter pipeline which generally makes it faster per clock but slower top clock speed. Krait also has unified reservation stations which I don't yet think is a feature that A15 has. Krait has smaller but higher associative caches. They should be very close to each other and certainly a quad krait should outperform a dual A15 pretty easily in multithreaded benchmarks presuming similar clock periods.

Sent from my Droid DNA

 

[Joe Rico]

In highly multithreaded benchmarks, yes. In real-world use, no. In typical real-world use, rarely is more than one core worth of processing used... three or four core use is extremely rare. And in such typical use situations, the more powerful the single core is, the better, and that will change the order of what you listed (for example, the dual core S4 will easily jump to at least 4th place in your list).

Yes....depending on the application running that list isn't set in stone.

The dual S4 is more cpu than many users will throw at it.

I'm still amazed at the performance of my GS3 after say going from several of the tablets I've used.

This thread forced me to finish all those Wiki articles I was in the middle of and re-visiting some benchmarks to help me put everything in perspective.

I was debating between a
few tablets but the Nexus 10 is a no-brainer now.

 

[Joshua O]

Why are two Ferraris better than four Honda Civics? If you can grasp that, you can understand.

Classic!

 

[xlDeMoNiClx]

Why are two Ferraris better than four Honda Civics? If you can grasp that, you can understand.

Because they're Honda Civics.

 

[LDawsonl Love]

nah heck no. amd octo-cores are way faster den and qaud core.

 

[anotherbrian]

Its like having a team of two fast horses versus a team of four slow horses.
In a race between horses, a fast horse always beats a slow horse.
But when there is a lot of weight to be carried, neither team has an advantage.
The slow horses carry the weight all at once and
the fast horses carry only half the weight, but deliver two loads in the same amount of time.
Same amount of work gets done.
It is harder to engineer two fast horses and cheap to replicate a bunch of slow horses.
Now aint that some horse sense!

 

[anotherbrian]

In highly multithreaded benchmarks, yes. In real-world use, no. In typical real-world use, rarely is more than one core worth of processing used... three or four core use is extremely rare. And in such typical use situations, the more powerful the single core is, the better, and that will change the order of what you listed (for example, the dual core S4 will easily jump to at least 4th place in your list).

It is very common for multiple cores to be used. Take for example watching a movie via internet. There is the video software which probably involves a couple of processes, and there is the communication stack, the Android OS, Linux maitenance processes, etc.....its all very busy in there even when not much is going on.

 

[crxssi]

It is very common for multiple cores to be used. Take for example watching a movie via internet. There is the video software which probably involves a couple of processes, and there is the communication stack, the Android OS, Linux maitenance processes, etc.....its all very busy in there even when not much is going on.

[I am a professional Linux sysadmin... I am very familiar with threading, multiprocessing, and typical loads, and spent lots of time watching top and digging through logs ] On a phone or tablet, it is extremely rare to have more than a few cores active for more than a small fraction of a second (except when playing certain games). Single user, typically single app without much background housekeeping. If you average the performance over a reasonable time, having more than two cores is usually not (but not always) noticeable by an end user of such devices. And if the fewer cores are faster than the several cores, you will almost always come out a winner with the faster/fewer on such devices. Would there be an advantage with 4 over 2 cores if they were all the same- of course. Not that most people will notice much of a difference. But when you start talking about 6 or 8 on a phone/tablet it just becomes more of a marketing thing.

 

[anotherbrian]

[I am a professional Linux sysadmin...

wow - professional........... impresssive........that enhances your credibilty. If what your saying is true, then the android engineers don't know what they are doing and hardware manufactures are wasting our money selling us cores that aren't used. I wouldnt necessarily believe stats provided by android interfaces. Instead use an app to execute mpstat linux command to see the processors utilization.

 

[crxssi]

wow - professional........... impresssive........that enhances your credibilty.

It should. My point is that I have been doing this stuff for a very long time and I am not just spouting uninformed drivel as seems common when topics like these appear. My three, main, three-year-old linux machines each has 12 x 3.1Ghz cores/ 24 threads and 48GB of ECC RAM. But it they also support hundreds of users and many thousands of processes at any given time. And you would probably be amazed at how idle each is, even during peak loads.

If what your saying is true, then the android engineers don't know what they are doing

No, it just means that phones and tablets rarely have enough to keep the cores busy. That is not necessarily a flaw. Not everything can be effectively threaded, and the huge majority of the time fast CPU's sit idle. The situation is improving as more creative programming and more advanced libraries help to break up problems into components that can be threaded more effectively.

and hardware manufactures are wasting our money selling us cores that aren't used.

They mostly are. It is far easier to add more cores but much harder to make them ever faster and more efficient. And there are many, many articles our there to support the fact- When not performing massively parallel tasks (such as video encoding/transcoding or huge math models) there is a rapid diminishing return on the real-world performance from number of cores in a typical single-user machine. Throw 4 cores in a phone/tablet, do you think anyone will notice over 2 or 3? OK, now try 8? Any difference? 16? 32? 64? At the moment, the most effective spot is 2 or 3 cores. 4 is a little help. Beyond that, the overall returns are barely noticeable in these devices with typical use.

Most consumers have no idea what a "core" is, they just know if one model has 4 of them, then 8 of them has to be twice as good.