Why you shouldn't be disappointed in the Dual Core version.

[E_man]

I've seen a lot of complaints on other android related sites about the One XL having "only" 2 S4 Krait cores rather than the One X's Tegra 3 quadcore. However, I'm personally glad that's the case. I'd probably buy the LTE version even if I didn't have LTE coming to my area for the entire time I would have the phone. Here's why.

Performance
But, but, but, 4 cores are more than 2! True, however there are a lot of times all four cores won't be used. Android's UI is single threaded (called the UI thread). That means all scrolling, highlights as you press a button, toast notifications, notification bar notifications, swipes, transitions, everything you see basically happens on this one UI thread. If you want a little more information, look here.

In that case, it makes sense that you would want a processor that is powerfull when it comes to single threaded tasks, right? As it so happens, the difference between the Tegra 3 and the S4 in single threaded applications seems significant. Heck, it's a huge difference from the previous champ the SGS2:

That should translate to some incredibly smooth UI. In fact, Anandtech stated in their preview that the S4 was the fastest they've ever seen ICS run on anything before.

However, let's say you are running an app that has spawned a ton of worker threads (for some reason) or are doing multiple things at once that use all the cores. Surely the Tegra 3 will catch up with it's four cores. Right?

Maybe not. This S4 is impressive. I don't expect anywhere NEAR this big of a difference in real world use, but I do expect to see an S4 advantage.

Battery
This will be very interesting when reviews of the One X and the One XL come out. I'm not sure who will win. The Tegra 3 has the companion core, where they S4 has LTE. However, it's the first chip with integrated LTE (much better for battery), and it is also done on the 28nm process rather than the 40nm process on the Tegra 3. Basically, it's more power efficient that way. So it's companion core vs lower power cores, and LTE with integrated LTE modem rather than a separate, powersucking radio.

Games
The Tegra 3 is better at games, sometimes. They seem to trade blows fairly evenly. However, GPU's where most of the gaming bottleneck will come in, so more cores may not help here. However, both chips soundly beat out devices like the Galaxy Nexus, the Razr, the SGS2, etc. How many games do you know that won't play on those phones? Both chips will be excellent for gaming, and both chips will have their own game stores (sadly). However, the Tegra Zone is already established with a good sized library. Hopefully Chainfire 3D will let you sort this out.

In all, these are both great chips, and the phone they are inside is going to be awesome. However, don't hate on the dual core

Sources:
AnandTech - Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Performance Preview - 1.5 GHz MSM8960 MDP and Adreno 225 Benchmarks
AnandTech - The Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait) Preview Part II

 

[84guy]

well said, ive been trying to tell people the same thing but ill just start linking them to this thread ^^, i cant wait to see the numbers of the S4 quad core with adreno 320

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

The biggest advantage the Tegra 3 has will be the optimized games available through Tegrazone. Those are HUGE wins for nvidia.

You can also look at it this way....a year ago Tegra 2 had the best games available. Now Tegra 3 does, and it has extra horsepower. The S4 has just as much CPU horsepower (but less GPU in general), but nothing to really take advantage of it.

So the advantage of S4 is that it should be just as battery efficient, and the UI is really smooth. If you play games on your phone then the Tegra 3 is the winner. It can play all Android games, and it has the Tegra optimized games as well. Having seen those in person they are extremely impressive.

I'll take battery life and LTE over tegrazone, though, personally.

EDIT: Especially if I'm going to keep this phone for 2 years or so.

 

[MrSlippery519]

Well said and I totally agree, people getting all fussed about the North American phone not being Tegra 3 are a bit over the top.

Fact is both processor's are very impressive, and the most important thing to me is that they both should show dramatic improvements in battery life which up to this point in my opinion has been a huge downside to these new phones.

 

[BoostHungry]

Thank you for posting this. I love the S4 and have been waiting for a good 28nm chip to give us increased performance, better battery, and integrated LTE for 6 months now. I too am tired of hearing people complain about not getting a Tegra 3. Personally I feel like people craving the Tegra 3 are the same people who are craving more of those magical megapixies for their camera.

If the S4 had a next gen gpu, it would be an absolute beast. But unfortunately its souped up version of the same old gpu we've been playing with for months brings the S4 down to just a great new chip as opposed to being the clear cut winner.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Thank you for posting this. I love the S4 and have been waiting for a good 28nm chip to give us increased performance, better battery, and integrated LTE for 6 months now. I too am tired of hearing people complain about not getting a Tegra 3. Personally I feel like people craving the Tegra 3 are the same people who are craving more of those magical megapixies for their camera.

If the S4 had a next gen gpu, it would be an absolute beast. But unfortunately its souped up version of the same old gpu we've been playing with for months brings the S4 down to just a great new chip as opposed to being the clear cut winner.

That's what the S4 Pro is for.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

THIS is nvidia's advantage.

 

[chrgnthru]

The S4 is fine but man oh man do I wish we had a choice of the S4 or the Tegra 3. I'd gladly give up LTE in exchange for the Tegra 3. I'm on wifi 90% of the time anyway.

 

[Mike20PR]

Im still skeptical. my dream is a HTC flagship with anything other than a Snapdragon chip. S4 might be impressive in benchmarks and on paper but qualcomm has fooled me too many times by showing awesome statistics and yet falls flat in real world use. S3 was the same story, it showed impressive comparisons that clearly shows its superiority in benchmarks and such, but how did that work out? its the laggiest dual core of them all in real use. I would not be surprised if the S4 is the same story. plus the benchmarks is the development model running on a qualcomm based device, sure it will have an advantage.
Still, ill hold my final judgement till we compare a S4 vs Tegra 3 One X face to face. Till then, my money is on the Tegra, otherwise HTC wouldnt have bothered with Tegra if it was clearly inferior. Plus Tegra 3 optimized games? drool...

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

I wouldn't necessarily blame the S3 on the performance issues. Sense 3.X was not very friendly to smoothness. I know people with S3's that have ran non-sense roms and they perform awesome.

You also have to remember that the S4 is a completely new chip. New process, new architecture. Completely different beast.

The S3 was like a stopgap while we waited on the S4 to drop. They had to do something to get dual core out, so they pulled an Intel and just slapped two single cores into one and called it dual core.

 

[nyc_rock]

Im leaning toward the international version with the tegra 3 and HSPA+. If battery life on the lte version is equivelent i may reconsider. I have no complaints with HSPA+ speeds and will always go for better battery life.

 

[thebizz]

The battery life for both should be comparable especially with lte disabled. The question is do you prefer overall speedy performance or better games. Its a hard choice

 

[E_man]

The biggest advantage the Tegra 3 has will be the optimized games available through Tegrazone. Those are HUGE wins for nvidia.

You can also look at it this way....a year ago Tegra 2 had the best games available. Now Tegra 3 does, and it has extra horsepower. The S4 has just as much CPU horsepower (but less GPU in general), but nothing to really take advantage of it.

So the advantage of S4 is that it should be just as battery efficient, and the UI is really smooth. If you play games on your phone then the Tegra 3 is the winner. It can play all Android games, and it has the Tegra optimized games as well. Having seen those in person they are extremely impressive.

I'll take battery life and LTE over tegrazone, though, personally.

EDIT: Especially if I'm going to keep this phone for 2 years or so.

THIS is nvidia's advantage.

Completely agree. Tegra Zone, for people who game, is probably the biggest advantage. Hopefully qualcomm's Game Arena (?) is as good. Better yet would be eliminating these proprietary stores all together. Oh well, for the most part, editing build.prop and getting chainfire 3D will fix your Tegra Zone fix, but that's is a much higher barrier to entry.

Im still skeptical. my dream is a HTC flagship with anything other than a Snapdragon chip. S4 might be impressive in benchmarks and on paper but qualcomm has fooled me too many times by showing awesome statistics and yet falls flat in real world use. S3 was the same story, it showed impressive comparisons that clearly shows its superiority in benchmarks and such, but how did that work out? its the laggiest dual core of them all in real use. I would not be surprised if the S4 is the same story. plus the benchmarks is the development model running on a qualcomm based device, sure it will have an advantage.
Still, ill hold my final judgement till we compare a S4 vs Tegra 3 One X face to face. Till then, my money is on the Tegra, otherwise HTC wouldnt have bothered with Tegra if it was clearly inferior. Plus Tegra 3 optimized games? drool...

Tegra 2 was a pretty bad chip as well, in the dual core spectrum. This is an entirely new architecture. They didn't just take the exact same processor as their old single core processors and add a second core, which is what the S3 chips were. As I said, Anandtech, who had a demo unit with an 1024*600 screen ran the smoothest they've seen. The person who put together the hardware means so little, especially when most of the guts are on one chip that manufacturers will be buying.

 

[katamari201]

Like when building a gaming PC you pick out the faster dual-core processor over the quad-core, the former usually cheaper and more power efficient on a smaller die. Multi-threading ain't easy or simple and ever since multiple cores started showing up in computers, the benefits have been marginal at best past dual-core. Unless you are for some reason encoding a highly compressed x264 video on your phone or tablet, the extra cores don't make much of a difference. The speed of the main core is king. The second one helps with overall smoothness and any games or applications that utilize dual-core effectively. Any extra cores will scale poorly with multi-core apps unless written specifically for a certain number of cores, and two is usually the max. Any additional cores is just automated or scaled threading and they can be pretty marginal aside from heavy stuff like encoding and heavy photo editing, which I hope no one is doing on a phone or tablet. There are precious few multi-thread programs for PC after all these years that dual/quad/multi core PCs have come out. It's usually for the sake of marketing (4 is better than 2) and multitasking, not individual application performance. The Android market has even less multi-threaded apps, and no need for the multitasking, the sort that desktops utilize anyway. That's why the jump from single to dual core has been relatively minor, even with optimization. Quad will be even less significant of a jump, and if the individual core can't compete, might perform even worse on day to day usage.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Like when building a gaming PC you pick out the faster dual-core processor over the quad-core, the former usually cheaper and more power efficient on a smaller die. Multi-threading ain't easy or simple and ever since multiple cores started showing up in computers, the benefits have been marginal at best past dual-core. Unless you are for some reason encoding a highly compressed x264 video on your phone or tablet, the extra cores don't make much of a difference. The speed of the main core is king. The second one helps with overall smoothness and any games or applications that utilize dual-core effectively. Any extra cores will scale poorly with multi-core apps unless written specifically for a certain number of cores, and two is usually the max. Any additional cores is just automated or scaled threading and they can be pretty marginal aside from heavy stuff like encoding and heavy photo editing, which I hope no one is doing on a phone or tablet. There are precious few multi-thread programs for PC after all these years that dual/quad/multi core PCs have come out. It's usually for the sake of marketing (4 is better than 2) and multitasking, not individual application performance. The Android market has even less multi-threaded apps, and no need for the multitasking, the sort that desktops utilize anyway. That's why the jump from single to dual core has been relatively minor, even with optimization. Quad will be even less significant of a jump, and if the individual core can't compete, might perform even worse on day to day usage.

The statement that I emphasized above is exactly what nvidia is doing. They are partnering with certain development houses to make games and apps specifically tailored to the quad core Tegra 3. Later this year they will release a Tegra 3 with built-in LTE radio, which will close any power savings gap that the S4 may/may not have.

 

[katamari201]

The statement that I emphasized above is exactly what nvidia is doing. They are partnering with certain development houses to make games and apps specifically tailored to the quad core Tegra 3. Later this year they will release a Tegra 3 with built-in LTE radio, which will close any power savings gap that the S4 may/may not have.

Relying on a sole company like Nvidia to make multi-threaded apps and games a standard practice is very iffy. For one, they will focus on games mainly, and not everyone plays games, and 3D ones even less How well stocked is Tegra Zone, how many phones have Tegra 2, and how many people actually care about the games there and point it out as a must have feature? This ain't any different than the Playstation ceritified phones. They ain't doin so well. Plus, as far as Tegra goes, beyond phones like the first Optimus 2x and Atrix, everyone has jumped ship to Qualcomm or OMAP. I guess you can count tablets, although their sales numbers suck.

The reason why I was comparing it to the PC is to point out that even they don't have a good selection of multi-threaded apps after all these years. What chance does a mobile platform have? And even if there were, the technical barrier of programming for multiple threads is still high. Ha, I'm regurgitating what I said before

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Relying on a sole company like Nvidia to make multi-threaded apps and games a standard practice is very iffy. For one, they will focus on games mainly, and not everyone plays games, and 3D ones even less How well stocked is Tegra Zone, how many phones have Tegra 2, and how many people actually care about the games there and point it out as a must have feature? This ain't any different than the Playstation ceritified phones. They ain't doin so well. Plus, as far as Tegra goes, beyond phones like the first Optimus 2x and Atrix, everyone has jumped ship to Qualcomm or OMAP. I guess you can count tablets, although their sales numbers suck.

The reason why I was comparing it to the PC is to point out that even they don't have a good selection of multi-threaded apps after all these years. What chance does a mobile platform have? And even if there were, the technical barrier of programming for multiple threads is still high. Ha, I'm regurgitating what I said before

I think the Zinio app was originally a Tegrazone exclusive. It also appears that a few big name companies are jumping on their touch technology (I can't remember what they called it, though).

 

[Ishken]

The problem I am having with this device is that it is only using 1GB of RAM. An extra 512MB or 1GB of RAM would make more sense to me than adding a quad core chip processor. I still rock the OG Droid overclocked to 1ghz and it isn't the processor that is making my phone sluggish; it is the low amount of RAM. This same issue comes up with my SGT 10.1 that is also overclocked to 1.4ghz and still hits these sluggish bumps because even beiong dual core, it is only using 1GB of RAM. I have a 6 year old Macbook White with Core Duo processor that I maxed out to 2GB RAM and only after I did that did it stop stuttering along. Even this is faster than my newer devices at performing simple tasks. I know it is comparing apples to oranges, but the effect of adding more RAM does boost performance.

So, why then are we still receiving phones and tablets that are being RAM throttled by 1-2 year old specs? Give me a higher clocked dual core chip with 2-3GB of RAM for my phone/tablet and I'm sure that I will be happy. At least until that 1600mAh battery dies after 6 hours of continual use.

 

[corneliusm]

Don't let nvidia's marketing fool you.

First, Nvidia's Tegra3 is severely crippled by its lackluster memory controller. The 4+1 cores are all A9, which have significantly lower IPC (~40%) than the newer Krait (Snapdragon S4) and A15 (used in TI's OMAP5, Samsung Exynos 5 series). The companion core in the T3 is not unlike the CortexA7 MPCores being implemented with the A15-based SOCs. As for efficiency, I argue that a smaller 2+1 28nm chip would be much more efficient than a 4+1 core, even if it is "intelligently" power-gated as nvidia claims.

On my Atrix, I don't really use Tegrazone and don't often play the Tegra-optimized games, and I probably wouldn't miss them. Most of these games can run fine on other devices (like my S3-powered HP Touchpad) using Chainfire- the games really aren't built from the ground-up to use Tegra, but simply use a simple device string check on startup. They mostly use standard OpenGL ES 2.0 calls anyway. I don't know about Tegra3 features, but from what I've seen, they don't look anything special, except for the tech demos.

Also, one of the biggest disappointments for the Tegra series is the lack of open source drivers. Nvidia doesn't release them, which means the community are at their mercy for implementation of new features (2d UI hardware acceleration in ICS, for example). Luckily, the CM9 team have been able to hack something from the O2X drivers for use in the Photon and Atrix to allow 2d gui acceleration, but currently hardware video acceleration still does not work. Still, I have it on my Atrix, but I'm disappointed that getting the Tegra2 drivers to work properly has been the biggest hurdle. The ICS roms on other devices I've seen are much more stable.

 

[corneliusm]

Not trying to bash the Tegra3 directly (though the lack of dual-channel LPDDR support leaves me perplexed by this poor decision), but my headaches with my Atrix and seeing the same issues on other Tegra2 devices, as well as the disabling of high-profile h264 decode (an artificial limitation, ask me for a link if you're interested), makes me very reluctant to consider another Tegra-powered device.