octocore processor

[Irvgotti]

Technology moves way faster than we thought it would. With all the quad core and teg 4 coming. How long do you guys think it will be until we see octocores? I know that sounds cray but do you think a cell phone needs all that power? What are your takes on this am I looking to far ahead or do you think its in the next few years?

 

[anon(94115)]

no need for it. Tablets maybe but not phones...at least not now (+/- 5 years)

digging a little bit it was only in December or so that Laptops got 8 cores so I think it will be sometime before we see them in cells, if ever

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

no need for it. Tablets maybe but not phones...at least not now (+/- 5 years)

digging a little bit it was only in December or so that Laptops got 8 cores so I think it will be sometime before we see them in cells, if ever

Laptops don't even have 8 cores. You can get some that are based around desktop processors with the hex core processor, but that's it. Anything else is hyper-threading, which has been around for a while.

I hope we stay at quad-core for a while and let them catch up on the software side and continue to tweak the hardware for better performance/battery life.

 

[taylorz_412]

Doesn't matter how fast or pixels it has if the battery is dead in 3 hours

 

[AndroidBlizzard]

no need for it. Tablets maybe but not phones...at least not now (+/- 5 years)

digging a little bit it was only in December or so that Laptops got 8 cores so I think it will be sometime before we see them in cells, if ever

+/-5???

Are you high?

We did not need octo core processors in 2007....

 

[tirith]

+/-5???

Are you high?

We did not need octo core processors in 2007....

This post just made me cough mtn dew on my photon... I don't even think dual core was uber-common in 07 laptops...

Swyped from my Photon using t-talk 2

 

[E_man]

I can see ARM processors overtaking x86 based processors in core count. A growing trend in almost everything but x86 cpu's is a large amount of low power cores is both faster and more power efficient than a few high power cores. Granted, that depends on the type of workload you are doing, but's a direction that could work for mobile devices. Next few years will be interesting.

 

[Irvgotti]

Yeah maybe octo is a little crazy but I feel like dual core was cool for a year and now we have quad. But it will be exciting to see cellphones in 2015-2020. Maybe battery life will be fixed by then

 

[steddora]

I see nothing but advances coming. octocores aren't that far of as there are people that would shell out a grand just for the "look what I got" factor. Its not like these phones even need a quad core. Very few quad core phones will ever see even near 100% usage. Even today, our dual cores probably only see that a few times in their lifetimes. I have an i7-2600k in my desktop. Even running two virtual machines as house files and media servers, the processor never hits total usage. Heck, it hardly ever jumps to the 3.4GHz rating unless its in windows seven. Good luck reaching that without compiling something huge on a Linux kernel. but I got my "I got it" factor for sure.

 

[MrSmith317]

Yeah maybe octo is a little crazy but I feel like dual core was cool for a year and now we have quad. But it will be exciting to see cellphones in 2015-2020. Maybe battery life will be fixed by then

Fixing battery life is as easy as everyone using wireless energy. Which will be a real reality in the next 10-15 years. So not only will the wireless company be sending you signal, but power as well. Once it goes large scale, it will power our electric cars as well. Gotta love Tesla.

Back on topic, the idea of having a phone with an octacore processor just seems to be missing a point. We want our phones to do certain things and do them fast. There has to be a delineation between phone/tab/laptop(or desktop). If you're using your phone very inefficiently as a tablet or laptop then you're probably losing someone money. This is why there is no "one device fits all" yet.

Mobile(Phone): No more than dual core, fast and light with great battery.

Semi-Mobile(Tablet): No more than quad core, fast and light and more feature rich that the mobile

Barely-Mobile(Laptop/Desktop): Sky's the limit

 

[E_man]

Fixing battery life is as easy as everyone using wireless energy. Which will be a real reality in the next 10-15 years. So not only will the wireless company be sending you signal, but power as well. Once it goes large scale, it will power our electric cars as well. Gotta love Tesla.

I am going to have to disagree with you there. I don't see there being many surfaces that do nothing but spit out power all day. The amount of waste energy per energy used would be astronomical. Wireless charging is going to continue to be a small scale, on your desk type thing for the foreseeable future, in my opinion.

There has to be a delineation between phone/tab/laptop(or desktop).

Why? What delineation is necessary besides form factor? What if I could just buy the guts, and stick them in any form factor I wanted? Arm is definitely getting powerful enough for a huge majority of applications, and the software is catching up. There does not need to be a delineation in my opinion on anything other than form factor.

 

[steddora]

Why? What delineation is necessary besides form factor? What if I could just buy the guts, and stick them in any form factor I wanted? Arm is definitely getting powerful enough for a huge majority of applications, and the software is catching up. There does not need to be a delineation in my opinion on anything other than form factor.

Form factor is just it. Arm powered devices are great; cell phones have reached the potential to really make a persons daily task even easier and on the go. I remember back in the day when the first 486 hit the market. 486sx! Running 25Mhz was insane. As my signature says, now my phone is faster than my computer only 8 years later. At that time I was running a single core Athlon XP 1700+ clocked to 2.1Ghz. May have a faster clock rating; but this small little battery operated processor in my phone could out run it in a number race all day. That's the beauty of dual core.

Now; as for what me or you may use our desktop/laptop computers for; the entire side of "going mobile" can only go so far. That data has to go somewhere. Massive servers that hold 100TB of information just can't be held in the palm of your hand (at least not yet). Software can only go so far; as can silicon dies in processors today. Multi-Core is just another way around a physical electronic element in processors. But as with everything; more cores = more space. Even though my i7 quad core processor is only the size of about a quarter; if we watch the next decade... My processor would be the size of a nickel while the newer 32-core (or whatever it is at that time) will be a bit larger.

If anything; I want to see that "crystal"/light powered cpu idea come to life. Speeds that just make anyone cry; and no heat? Still a bit far fetched; but so is powering my device a mile away from anything.

But the future is the future; and honestly I'm excited to watch the next 15 years of computing. No doubt my cell phone will be more powerful than this home server. Just hope that thing has 16GB of ram too!

 

[E_man]

Form factor is just it. Arm powered devices are great; cell phones have reached the potential to really make a persons daily task even easier and on the go. I remember back in the day when the first 486 hit the market. 486sx! Running 25Mhz was insane. As my signature says, now my phone is faster than my computer only 8 years later. At that time I was running a single core Athlon XP 1700+ clocked to 2.1Ghz. May have a faster clock rating; but this small little battery operated processor in my phone could out run it in a number race all day. That's the beauty of dual core.

Now; as for what me or you may use our desktop/laptop computers for; the entire side of "going mobile" can only go so far. That data has to go somewhere. Massive servers that hold 100TB of information just can't be held in the palm of your hand (at least not yet). Software can only go so far; as can silicon dies in processors today. Multi-Core is just another way around a physical electronic element in processors. But as with everything; more cores = more space. Even though my i7 quad core processor is only the size of about a quarter; if we watch the next decade... My processor would be the size of a nickel while the newer 32-core (or whatever it is at that time) will be a bit larger.

If anything; I want to see that "crystal"/light powered cpu idea come to life. Speeds that just make anyone cry; and no heat? Still a bit far fetched; but so is powering my device a mile away from anything.

But the future is the future; and honestly I'm excited to watch the next 15 years of computing. No doubt my cell phone will be more powerful than this home server. Just hope that thing has 16GB of ram too!

I think you are looking at things a little more immediately than I am. I'm talking 10 years from now, we'll be all mobile. The guts will be exactly the same. We used to use servers. If you wanted any kind of "personal" computing, you basically needed your own server. Then we got desktops. Servers are still FAR more powerful, but desktops were good enough. Then laptops came along. Desktops are still far more powerful, but laptops are, again, good enough. 5-10 years, laptops will still be more powerful, but phones/tablets will be good enough, and more convienent for a lot of things.

There will be people that cling to the old ways. I still use a desktop as a primary machine. My work requires it as an engineer. But for a large portion of the population, tablets and phones will be powerful enough, and more convenient. Arguably, the hardware to say they are "fast enough" is there. The software just needs catching up. Once that happens, why delineate by hardware? I would love to see Windows 9 RT be the main seller, on laptop form factors, tablets, and phones. The more form factors that share an OS, the better the software, imho.

 

[MrSmith317]

The reason I even brought up the different platforms for different uses was because of screen size. Phones are a bit small to do application development or even spreadsheets/word processing. It's a great mobile tool for reviewing though. Tablets come in only slightly better and authoring only gets easier as screen size goes up. I refuse to think of a phone as anything but a media consumption device(except for the camera). Tablets can go both ways, and laptop/desktops can go above and beyond. However the big problem comes in with battery life, so unless someone manages to cram 3-4 days of battery life with heavy use into a phone, the number of cores they cram into the phone (beyond two) starts to become irrelevant.

 

[TvTechGuru]

The fastest laptop is only running a 6-core Intel chip. I don't think we'll see or need anything faster than a quad-core CPU in a cell phone. I think they'll increase the clock speed as technology advances. The more important thing to me is battery power. We need a new breakthrough in this department when it comes to powering cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other portable electronics.

I know this may sound silly, but what we really need is someone or some company to crack the code on self contained fuel cells or power cells, whatever it may be described as. What I'm getting at is something along the lines of Iron Man's "arc reactor". I wonder how far off we are from inventing or discovering that. Imagine you're cell phone, tablet, or laptop being powered by an arc reactor type power source. You'd never have to charge it, and the arc reactor-like power source would have a shelf life of X-amount of months, or perhaps years. Then you go out and buy a new one when it's dead.

That's what I want to see!

 

[blacksapphire08]

There is no need for an octocore processor in a phone, let alone a quad core. You have to keep in mind that a newer, more efficient architecture can be a much better improvement rather than adding more cores. For example in desktop CPU's, a dual core i3-2100 (yes it has hyperthreading) will beat out many older true quad cores simply due to a faster architecture. I've seen similar results between the new S4 dual core processors and quad core Tegra 3 in phones.

 

[sirheck]

Ok, so any ideas on how to shoehorn this into my Galaxy Note?

AMD ships '16-core' Bulldozer-powered Opteron 6200 -- Engadget

 

[Destoration]

I love hardware and being able to say "I have xxxxxxxx amount of ram and cores in my pc" but a excellent point thats been made here is software. Companies keep churning out new versions of software every year/few years and most of the time it doesn't run any better than before. If we had truly optimized software there wouldn't be a need for 8/16 core cpu's in anything less than servers or high end cad setups. Maybe I just miss windows xp :-\

 

[TDMaster]

first the hardware needs to reach its max potinal
very low nm and max battery
adding cores its kinda waste of time if nothing supports it
inlcuding PC hardware

 

[steddora]

Well, we all must remember the business aspect of our hardware in or computers. Are any of us going to use the full potential of an i7 quad core processor? Not much likely. However, there are businesses and some people that will. Software is behind the game as the competition isn't that great. However, hardware continues to grow more powerful everyday. Like was said a few posts ago, architecture can make a huge difference. If you watch the amd vs Intel war in the late 1990's... You would truly appreciate that. Even though the "speed rating" in mhz was faster on the amd chips, the Intel line slaughtered the competition in brute number crunches every time.

There less the catch though that many forget. Example being, the older core 2 duo processors running at say 2.4GHz used more power than the i5 quad cores. Simple sizing of the transistor spacing and better designs on the pipeline really cut the power consumption on the processor. There is the best if both worlds, better power and better speed.

Which turns me back to the Intel atom processor... One of the most innovative designs in it's time, look at it's performance to power ratio and we'll drool.

Now is there anything we do on or phones that need a quad core processor? Most likely not. Will they continue to make them? Absolutely, because we all can agree, bragging to an iPhone owner about your quad core processor just sounds so much better... Even though there are plenty of dual core processors that can't only keep up, but save allot more power and sometimes perform even better than that extra two cores can.

So remember, will someone buy it? If so, they will make it.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Android Central Forums