Is Dual core? That's so 2011 darling. We
take a look at the four-headed
The mobile chip race is beginning to look
like a re-run of the desktop CPU race of around 7 years ago, with leaps and
bounds being made in power and energy saving every year.
Two years ago we got the first 1 GHz mobile
CPUs in phones, an innovation at the time that was impressive in itself - you
will no doubt remember the first 1 GHz desktop CPUs in 2000. Ten years later
they popped up in your hand. These devices, like HTC's Desire and Samsung's
Galaxy S were slick, quick and impressive, and they took mobiles into a whole
new era.
Samsung's Exynos 4 Dual
Then last year chip manufacturers opted for
only slight speed bump of 0.2 or 0.5GHz but this time doubling up on the cores,
something AMD only achieved some seven years hence with their Opteron CPU.
Chips like Samsung's Exynos 4 Dual, NVidia’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon
S3 were the power behind some impressive technology, from the Galaxy S II to
the Note and the ASUS Transformer. Dual core devices were every bit as
impressive as the 1GHz devices of the year before.
But technology waits for no man. Having
learned that a faster clock speed is not always the best way to go with
processors, especially where power consumption is a large factor, 2012 saw the
inevitable four core CPUs. Tegra 3 and Exynos 4 Quad are the big players here,
with NVidia’s chips powering the mighty HTC One X and Google's own Nexus 7
tablet, with Samsung's Exynos unsurprisingly being the power in the Galaxy S3
and Note II.
It is not all about the CPUs though as any
PC gamer will know. Increasingly the attached GPUs are proving to be just as
important, with some otherwise powerful phones not fulfilling their potential
due to an underpowered graphics processor. This is becoming even more important
with the release of Android Jelly Bean, as more and more of the Ul is offloaded
onto the GPU to free the CPU up for actual number crunching. So a poor GPU
really could undermine the good work of the CPU. Certainly Samsung has this
licked with the awesome Mali 400 GPU present on every Exynos chipset, with
NVidia catching up with the Tegra 3's GeForce related GPU.
Nexus 7 tablet
If you've used a Galaxy S3, One X, Nexus 7
or a Transformer Prime, you'll know that these devices, with their quad core
CPUs and excellent GPUs are true next generation devices. They aren't fazed by
HD video recording and playback, and chew through games with near
console-quality graphics and multitasking, all while running like a well-oiled
weasel.
So why are some high end devices stilling
dual cores? Well, surprisingly there are some dual core chipsets that can
nearly match the quad core ones punch for punch. Take Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4,
present in the HTC One S. While it's often used in the US in combination with
LTE modems, it is engineered so well that in day to day use it will perform
just as capably as any of the quad cores. Some of this is achieved by a speed
bump to 1.5GHz but most is achieved by being fabricated at 28nm, beating the
Exynos' 32nm and Tegra 3's 40nm by an impressive margin. Smaller processors
consume less power while being nearly as powerful, and certainly to the average
user it'd be no different with the exception of better battery life.
We are at an interesting point with mobile
processors we've got to the four cores that desktop has generally stuck with,
and it would seem unlikely we will see mainstream six or eight-cored phones.
It's now down to refinements with ever smaller fabrication leading to more
power with less power consumption. But really, who knows what kind of science
fiction we will be putting to our ears in another three years’ time?
