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Why are people so core / ram focused ?

1 GB of RAM? Only 1 GB of RAM? On a tablet? What the **** were they thinking?

I only have 1 GB of RAM in my phone and I definitely feel it in the form of random lag because of the limited RAM in the phone. I can't imagine how it would feel in a tablet.

Damn dude, tech is an ever evolving market, 1GB of system ram is NOT the end of the world, get over it. If it bothers you that much get something else.
 
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This is interesting. My dad's car has the same engine as mine, yet his is 150bhp and mine is 120. The fuel economy is the same but his would use more fuel if he drove it harder and made use of the extra power. Could this be the same with the s4 and HTC? Both have the same processor but the s4 has the potential to use more battery if the tasks are demanding enough?

The SGS4 when using the same Snapdragon 600 as the One is clocked higher, that's a potential for more battery use.

Clock speeds aren't constant, they vary with the load of running apps.

The screen in the SGS4 would be expected to perhaps use less power than the One.

After that comes any differences in the radio circuitry for power draw, and it's too soon to know anything about that.

If you use either hard, it's going to draw power faster than using either moderately.

Your mileage may vary. ;)
 
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I just hope they fixed the HDMI out issue the LTE GS3 has. You can not use the HDMI function if the data radios are on. It only works with wifi. If you turn the radios on, the video signal goes in and out every few seconds on the output display. Something to do with the integrated HDMI design and radio interference that impacts the video signal. Nuts.
 
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I just hope they fixed the HDMI out issue the LTE GS3 has. You can not use the HDMI function if the data radios are on. It only works with wifi. If you turn the radios on, the video signal goes in and out every few seconds on the output display. Something to do with the integrated HDMI design and radio interference that impacts the video signal. Nuts.

Is it possible to switch the lte radio off and just use 3g? I don't really know how these things work
 
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Curiously speaking, would it make a bigger deal if each app was capable of running a single dedicated core? So 8 cores = 8 dedicated apps running its own core without spill over. I heard Intel was trying to work on muticores that would do this. One being a 48-core beast. But again assigning each app to its own dedicated core.

Now would that matter to an end user if that ever happened? And of course, you would have to wonder about efficiency and battery drain too.
 
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That's an incredible waste of a lot of computing power.

The average program, even on a PC, barely comes close to utilizing the full computing power of a CPU core. More often than not, a CPU core is doing nothing, idling, etc.

Take my desktop PC for instance, an Intel Core i5 CPU with 16 GBs of RAM. 99% of the time each core's utilization percentages sit below 10 to 15%. And I've got a lot of programs running but still CPU utilization is very very low.

Now, take your typical smart phone app. Those apps pale in comparison to the average desktop app in terms of complexity and capabilities. So yes, having a CPU core dedicated to an app would be incredibly wasteful.
 
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Curiously speaking, would it make a bigger deal if each app was capable of running a single dedicated core? So 8 cores = 8 dedicated apps running its own core without spill over. I heard Intel was trying to work on muticores that would do this. One being a 48-core beast. But again assigning each app to its own dedicated core.

Now would that matter to an end user if that ever happened? And of course, you would have to wonder about efficiency and battery drain too.

This is a dual quadcore, only 4 run at a time, and the job model is called preemptive multitasking, because Android runs on Linux.

It's far more efficient than what you're describing, plus it's possible. One app per core isn't.

The operating system and services need to run somewhere.

Plus, multiple cores are already being exploited by threaded apps as well as the threaded operating system.

The blogosphere articles teaching you that apps are optimized for multicore processors are being written by ignoramus weenies who've never coded an app in their lives, have no clue whatsoever about how operating systems work (more to the point, they understand how Android really works much the same as how a giraffe knows how his home zoo works) and ought to be punished for starting this with people.

Your multicore Android device, be it dual, quad, or dual quad (being marketed under the outrageously flaming octa lie) knows how to exploit the cores just fine.

As do the apps.

The idea that you need to get optimized apps is so ridiculous that it doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong.

Nothing is broken here.
 
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Sorry, I understand it is a dual-quad core. But it is an interesting concept if it was truly an octacore CPU (which it is not).

Right now apps don't exploit the raw processing power of a single core. Now if it was able to would that not be better than having it try to run through multiple cores? I (by all means) am not an expert. It was just an interesting thought I came across.
 
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Sorry, I understand it is a dual-quad core. But it is an interesting concept if it was truly an octacore CPU (which it is not).

Right now apps don't exploit the raw processing power of a single core. Now if it was able to would that not be better than having it try to run through multiple cores? I (by all means) am not an expert. It was just an interesting thought I came across.

Ok, I understand where you're coming from.

Many apps are not just simple programs. Developers often build them with what we call threads, each thread controlling a certain function.

Take a music player. One thread can be dedicated to playing the music (by tying a stream to audio services) while another is providing the display with your controls and sensing your inputs. The operating system, if hardware is available and the dev wrote the app correctly, will run those two threads at once on separate cores. Now the audio services has threads to play the tune, and maintain routing as well as interruptions, say for a phone call. And the streaming bit is also divided into threads.

Some threads must run in a particular order, others can run in parallel.

On a single core, all of those things have to take turns. So now the operating system gets a thing called the scheduler and that has to run at a higher priority than anything else.

Distribute all of that to high speed multiple cores and everything not only runs much more smoothly, but the cores run slower by not being tasked so hard, thus allowing a high-speed multicore to use less of your battery than a single core.

And because Android is actually running a LOT of support services at once, each core in a multicore system is being managed exactly like a single core phone, because each core is executing more than one process or thread from within a process.

So, the key to higher performance isn't forcing things that could be parallelized across cores onto taking-turns on a single core - the key to higher performance is more intelligent thread control and process scheduling distributed across more cores.

To say that apps don't exploit the power of a single core is a point of view problem.

If they did, then they would not parallelize, and the operating system could not magically allow them to run better just by putting them on a more powerful phone. You'd have to actually start re-writing things as core count increased.

The way iPhone apps had to when they went dual core.

The way Around apps never had to because the design principles don't make the developer work that way.

This is why multicore optimization that I ranted about is just so wrong.

And why you don't want dedicated core processing for your apps.

There are industrial systems that split out as you suggest - I've written them. But those involve completely different problems, and that doesn't apply here.

Hope this helps! :)
 
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The key bottleneck issue is usually the memory channel and the stack/register algorithm used to minimize bottlenecks. Case in point is the Tegra 3, since they built a fast engine (chipset) into a car with bald tires (memory channel).

Any bottleneck along the process chain is same result- a bottleneck. The new Sammy chip apparently has to juggle between two quad cores, so might have weakness in some tasks.

The more I mess with the iPad 4 and its chipset, the more impressed I am, so something that is even 50% faster- real world, NOT lame (IMO) synthetic benchmarks- I will be VERY content :) If even faster, butter on the biscuit!
 
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The key bottleneck issue is usually the memory channel and the stack/register algorithm used to minimize bottlenecks. Case in point is the Tegra 3, since they built a fast engine (chipset) into a car with bald tires (memory channel).

Any bottleneck along the process chain is same result- a bottleneck. The new Sammy chip apparently has to juggle between two quad cores,...

Interesting statement. Since the two quad cores are there for different situations - processing power vs battery, the moment you start using cpu intensive apps it will use the faster cpu and have no reason to switch until you are done. Do you think you will be able to notice the moment of switching and treat that as a slow down?
 
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We don't know and I think that's the part that scares some people.

I think this might be due to some conception of switching involving having to "fire up" the second CPU and wait until it's up to speed, or something. (I had this image :eek:)

In fact what would likely happen is that from the moment the system has decided to switch cores, the next program instruction would be processed on the second CPU and it would be a hiatus-free transition.

However, a potential for lag could be a failure of the system to decide in time that it needs to switch, therefore remaining on the lower powered CPU for longer than is advisable, causing the phone to be under-powered momentarily...
 
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Interesting statement. Since the two quad cores are there for different situations - processing power vs battery, the moment you start using cpu intensive apps it will use the faster cpu and have no reason to switch until you are done. Do you think you will be able to notice the moment of switching and treat that as a slow down?

I would say it will be a benchmark issue and users will not notice (IF there really is an issue). Perhaps from a programming standpoint, the stars would have to align in a bad way for the user to notice- if ever.


Added:

As far as discrete function for each core set, they still have to traffic upon the same memory channel. My near worthless guess is this is a tech speak issue and users would be oblivious. Seems only Nvidia has the habit of functionally bottlenecking their chipsets ;)
 
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Right, must be the first time but my S3 run out of juice for the first time. Music kept stopping to play and I presumed corrupt MP3s. After a while I noticed that it mainly seemed to be doing that when I was browsing the web. Look at memory usage showed almost 800MB used out of 832MB available. Cleared RAM and all good.

Having said that though. Clearly down to bad programming as it made no difference whether apps were running in the background or not. Only active apps are chrome and music player. So same point really. If an app has a memory leak then more Ram would just mean the app can use now to 'leak' :)

It's like Microsoft SQL Server. You got 4GB of Ram, it uses 100%. You upgrade to 32GB of Ram, it uses it. So unless you know that you can limit SQL to use x-amount of Ram, you will always think it runs out and you throw more DIMMS at it (real life example happened two days ago).
 
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