Hey all,
I have been wondering about this recently, and thought I'd ask here. Why do Android phones need so many cores on their processors? If at all?
The iPhone 5s still has a 2 core processor and it runs brilliantly. For years now one of the focus points for Android phones has been the number of cores it has. It's kind of like the "megapixel wars" of cameras. More is better. Don't buy this dual-core processor phone, ours has EIGHT! But really, are they necessary?
Motorola broke the "more cores" dynamic
The biggest evidence to me (that they don't) seems to be Motorola's latest offerings. The Moto X has Motorola's custom X8 processor, based on a Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor. Through the amount of optimisation they carried out along with smaller processors for tasks such as natural language processing, they have created a phone that performs fantastically, without the high frequencies and number of cores that others like Samsung and LG put in their smartphone line-ups.
In terms of performance, it is pretty awesome. Most people claim it to be smooth and responsive, which is probably also helped by a near-stock experience and lack of Touchwiz/Sense/bloatware etc. Looking at some test results from Anandtech we can see this to be the case:
Moto X holds it's own against the 8-core Galaxy S4 and quad-core HTC One
Some might say battery life is increased through having more as lower frequency cores can be utilised for light tasks, however looking at the Anandtech review for the Moto X we can see that there is not much difference. Interestingly enough, they concluded that having 2 cores didn't improve battery life much either, contrary to Googorola's claims.
So at the end of the day, what does it come down to? Is it simply that all these cores are necessary because OEMs such as Samsung aren't willing to spend the time and effort required to optimise their phones to perform well on processors with less cores? Perhaps it is simply like the aforementioned "megapixel wars" of cameras, and more cores is predominantly a marketing ploy?
Either way it will be interesting to see what kind of processors Motorola use in the future after being bought by Lenovo, and where Samsung, HTC et al. go from here.
I have been wondering about this recently, and thought I'd ask here. Why do Android phones need so many cores on their processors? If at all?
The iPhone 5s still has a 2 core processor and it runs brilliantly. For years now one of the focus points for Android phones has been the number of cores it has. It's kind of like the "megapixel wars" of cameras. More is better. Don't buy this dual-core processor phone, ours has EIGHT! But really, are they necessary?
Motorola broke the "more cores" dynamic
The biggest evidence to me (that they don't) seems to be Motorola's latest offerings. The Moto X has Motorola's custom X8 processor, based on a Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor. Through the amount of optimisation they carried out along with smaller processors for tasks such as natural language processing, they have created a phone that performs fantastically, without the high frequencies and number of cores that others like Samsung and LG put in their smartphone line-ups.
In terms of performance, it is pretty awesome. Most people claim it to be smooth and responsive, which is probably also helped by a near-stock experience and lack of Touchwiz/Sense/bloatware etc. Looking at some test results from Anandtech we can see this to be the case:
Moto X holds it's own against the 8-core Galaxy S4 and quad-core HTC One
Some might say battery life is increased through having more as lower frequency cores can be utilised for light tasks, however looking at the Anandtech review for the Moto X we can see that there is not much difference. Interestingly enough, they concluded that having 2 cores didn't improve battery life much either, contrary to Googorola's claims.
So at the end of the day, what does it come down to? Is it simply that all these cores are necessary because OEMs such as Samsung aren't willing to spend the time and effort required to optimise their phones to perform well on processors with less cores? Perhaps it is simply like the aforementioned "megapixel wars" of cameras, and more cores is predominantly a marketing ploy?
Either way it will be interesting to see what kind of processors Motorola use in the future after being bought by Lenovo, and where Samsung, HTC et al. go from here.