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Cor Blimey, the mobile chip space is heating up, as the various players carry out their own little ARM’s race to beef up on performance, mainly through the addition of more cores.
“The battle is underway,” writes commentator Jack Gold, as the chip firms strut their silicon stuff and try to persuade users that the more cores they have in their devices, the better.
Of course, this performance posturing is nothing new in the PC space where Intel and AMD have been butting heads and grunting at each other for yonks, but with the mobile industry fast reaching puberty, it looks like we can expect to see a lot more chest thumping.
But, as Gold points out, “does a user that primarily surfs the web and does email on a mobile device really need a multi-core processor?”
To my mind, that’s sort of like asking whether you actually need RedBull to give you wings, or a Gecco to sell you car insurance, but that’s just because I’m a bitter cynic.
The fact is, most people don’t know or care that they don’t really need multi-cores for emailing, app-ing about or doing a bit of browsing online. Single cores can do all of that just fine, but the beauty of the American marketing machine is that companies are able to convince consumers that YES, YOU REALLY, REALLY NEED THIS. Think you could email before?! Bah! See how much speedier you can email on a quad core! (hint….it’s all in the fingers…)
Let’s face it, though, it’s not really about the smartphones is it? It’s about the tablets. It’s about 3D tablets, HD video, console and maybe even PC level gaming coming to mobile and all that other good stuff we are told we want and need to make our lives that much more complete.
Fair enough, so I want more cores then. AHA, NO YOU DON’T! What you really want is more GPUs. Confused? Befuddled? Allow me to explain.
The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is where all the program instructions are executed in order to derive the necessary data. It’s kind of like the brain of your device.
The GPU, meanwhile, primarily provides hardware acceleration for 3D graphics applications like games, or to enhance the playback of videos. In other words, GPU’s boost performance tremendously and can offload a lot of stress from the CPU, but they can’t replace it. They’re specialized, and while GPU’s may be able to perform some tasks much faster than CPUs, they are not able to cover all of the capabilities of the CPU.
Also, while most mobile chipmakers use the same ARM core CPU design, companies like Qualcomm and NVIDIA have their own in-house designed multi-core GPUs coming down the pipeline.
So, while several vendors have already announced their intent to ship multi-ARM core CPU chips -NVIDIA says it will ship a quad core product in August, followed by Qualcomm in early 2012, followed by TI, Samsung, Marvel, et all after that – that has little to do with the kind of performance you really need to SEE a difference.
Perhaps that’s why NVIDIA is also adding 12 GPU cores along with its four CPU cores in its upcoming Tegra 3 chips.
That’s enough cores to pack a serious punch, and one player who will be keenly feeling the pain is Qualcomm, which has the graphical capability to match NVIDIA, but will be late to the game with its quad cored wonder.
For those unlucky chip firms who don’t have on-staff graphics gurus, there is always the IP licensing route. Imagination Technologies has been licensing out its graphical know-how to mobile chip makers for years and now CPU IP player ARM is also sticking its oar in, though whether that will be a success or not remains to be seen.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle for ARM in graphics, although it may win in some lower performance, cost oriented designs,” says Gold.
Also, while bigger and more might sound better to a public used to being bombarded with advertising, it’s important to remember that there is a huge trade-off between increased performance, battery power, heat generation, and device costs. Because life is full of annoying compromises.
This, notes Gold, is less critical in tablets where batteries are bigger, BOM costs are more flexible, and where users have greater performance/functionality demands, but it’s still ludicrous to imagine needing a smartphone packing a quad core.
Gold puts it rather more gently than I do, however, saying he believes “increasing the number of cores in smartphones and other small form factor devices will take a longer time to emerge, and will need to take advantage of the ‘ripple down’ effect of lower chip costs over time, reduced chip geometries for power savings, and increased app functionality, before it takes hold.”
But I reckon we’re both wrong, actually, because marketeers these days can sell anything if they put their multi-cored minds to it.
