Eight cores or just gimmicks

This time last year, we are talking about the mobile phone is about to enter the four-core era, and this year, the eight nuclear has come quietly. At the recent 2013 US consumer Electronics Show, Samsung unveiled the Exynos 5 octa eight core mobile processor. The release of the eight-core mobile processor will no doubt lead to another escalation of the phone processor kernel war, which may have been jianzaixianshang. But in the case of short Neinian of battery capacity, it will be hard to sustain a nuclear war. Perhaps the eight-core is just a publicity stunt.

What is the eight-core?

What is the eight-core? Let's take a look at Samsung's Exynos 5Octa eight core mobile processor, released this year at CES, which uses a 28nm process, big.LITTLE solution based on ARM, containing two four nuclear chips, 1.8GHz CORTEX-A15 Architecture processor and 1.2GHZ CORTEX-A7 architecture processor respectively.

Exynos 5Octa, although known as the eight core, but is actually composed of two sets of quad-core processors, a group is a quad-core CortexA15, a group of four core Cortex-a7, with the latest release of arm CCI-400 linked together. Each "core" is a separate arm processor, with eight of them put together to build a complete system chip. By common sense, the eight-core must be stronger and more power-hungry than the quad. In fact, the next generation of eight cores will not adopt the current equivalent core design, but the "senior + small Four-core" design-four high-performance and four Low-power low performance (ARM of the big. Little architecture).

Consumers generally believe that the more nuclear, mobile phone function must be more powerful. But from big. Little architecture itself, compared to the current four-core processors, the eight-core processor is actually not a substantial upgrade, in the low load operation may be more cost-free.

In addition, the current four core has some excess performance, tests show that quad-core processors are only awakened when they run video, maps, Web pages, file compression, and games, while other programs rarely use four processors at the same time, and only when running file compression and large 3D games, The occupancy rate of the four cores will be over 50%. Such data suggest that the quad-core is now fully responsive to our needs.

From the point of view of ordinary consumers, the increase of the number of mobile phone cores brings them the most intuitive feeling is that the mobile phone is more prone to fever.

Eight cores or just gimmicks

Performance and power consumption are actually the most important parameters for mobile processors, according to the chip industry insiders. And the performance of the level is not actually determined by the number of "nuclear", architectural characteristics and manufacturing process is the decisive indicator.

From the point of view of touch fluency, many Android King will appear when touch "card" phenomenon, and the iphone smooth touch experience forever gives the user the most real touch feeling. Of course, this phenomenon is not the performance of the mobile phone itself, but the operating mechanism of the mobile phone system. iOS has the highest priority for screen response, which means that the user touches the screen, the system is optimized to process the screen display first, and then the other processing content. And Android is the traditional kernal architecture, graphic image processing in li-brary this layer, priority is lower, if the system load is high, it is too busy to take into account the user touch response. It also explains that Apple's iphone product has been using dual-core chips, but its overall experience is still ahead of other handsets.

So far, Android phones are not perfect, compared to "poorly configured" iphones that do better than Android phones. Nowadays, the user chooses the handset main reference no longer is the configuration has how high, usually must by the hardware, the software as well as the application overall coordination to decide, the handset product overall soft and hard experience, with the system depth and the hardware union is far more meaningful than eight cores, 16 cores, 32 cores.

There is no doubt that the eight nuclear war has begun. But it is widely believed that in the case of short Neinian of battery capacity, multiple nuclear war will be difficult to endure. Perhaps the eight-core is just a publicity stunt.

Consumers should choose rationally

Over the past year, the mainstream handset chip manufacturers Qualcomm, MTK (MediaTek), NVIDIA, etc. have launched four of nuclear chips, and the latest listed smartphones are mostly four nuclear chips as standard configuration. But before the four-core market was fully occupied, the eight-core handset processor had actually been put on the agenda by chip makers. Before Samsung, MediaTek and Nvidia had heard about the development of an eight-core processor, but the final product had yet to be released. When smartphones first appeared, a publicity stunt was just as powerful as a computer, and now it's becoming a reality. Smart phones can not only replace the computer to complete a variety of work, in the hardware update also began to gradually closer to the computer architecture. As a result, the core processor speed, quantity, is rapidly becoming the major intelligence expert machine manufacturers new product publicity focus. So what is the choice for consumers in the face of dual-core, quad-core or even eight cores? For this issue, senior mobile phone players think, can not simply use the core number to see the problem, the key is to look at their own needs, the single core in performance than the dual core must have a disadvantage, but mainly in the game, graphics and other aspects, the daily Internet, Office, communication, and so there is not much difference between the two, but because the core number of less, Single-core products in the power consumption is also smaller, standby capacity has a certain advantage. Also, the fluency of smartphone usage depends on the degree of optimization of the operating system.

"Nuclear" is only a part of the mobile phone, the flow of the mobile phone is also subject to a variety of factors, such as the quality of the camera, directly affect the picture, the quality of the screen, in the display of pictures, video image performance has a great impact. The design of the operating system, the UI optimization of the mobile interface is also a key factor to the user experience.

These companies are pushing eight-cell phones

Samsung: Samsung unveiled the Exynos 5Octa processor chip at the CES conference to compete with TEGRA4 chips and Qualcomm 800 series chips. Samsung's 8-core processor, which contains two four-core chips in its chip package, promises to improve performance without reducing battery life. The four cores are used for gaming and video processing, and another four seemingly powerful kernels are used to process text and mail.

Huawei: After Samsung, Huawei will also launch the A15 architecture of the Heiss eight-core processor. Yu, chairman of Huawei Terminal, said in an interview that Huawei would launch eight core processors in the second half of the year, while the mobile phone for the processor was an upgraded version of Ascend D2 and Ascend Mate, and of course, the timing of the two handsets was unclear.

ZTE: ZTE launched its new Nubia series in December last year, mainly for the high-end mobile phone market, the first model--NUBIAZ5. NubiaZ5 is not yet on the market, but rumours are rife that NubiaZ7 will carry a 6.3-inch screen and the processor will be equipped with a 5-series 8 core processor from Samsung Orion.