How many cores does a mobile processor need? While Samsung and ARM make a convincing case for the Galaxy S4’s octo-core processor, other chipmakers are clearly implying that they think eight cores is not much more than a marketing ploy.
Qualcomm is the latest company to ask if the emperor is really wearing clothes. According to Taiwanese media reports, Qualcomm SVP Anand Chandrasekher recently compared the process of combining eight cores to throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what might stick. When asked if Qualcomm had plans to develop an octo-core processor, Chandrasekher reportedly answered, “We don’t do dumb things.”
Chandrasekher was commenting on last month’s news that Taiwan’s MediaTek has unveiled plans for an octo-core processor of its own. Unlike Samsung’s Exynos 5 octo-core chip, which activates different cores at different times depending upon the task at hand, the MediaTek chipset will feature eight ARM A7 cores that can all process commands at the same time. The processor is said to reach speeds of 2 GHz, significantly slower than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.
Proponents of the octo-core design have focused more on longer battery life than on faster speeds. “We’re able to extend the dynamic processing range of mobile devices and we’re able to achieve greater energy efficiencies than existing techniques today,” said Laurence Bryant, director of marketing for mobile solutions at ARM, when demonstating ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture that Samsung licensed to create the Exynos 5.
Imagination Technologies, which is set to be become a direct competitor to ARM when it launches mobile CPU cores based on the MIPS architecture later this year, is on the other side of the fence when it comes to octo-core designs. “Do you need eight CPUs in a mobile phone? Probably not,” said Mark Throndson, director of processor technology marketing at Imagination. “The complexity of SoCs has gotten to the point where it’s less about adding new things and more about actually taking advantage of all the different types of processing horsepower that are available in the technology that’s being used today … Whether you need so many CPUs is debatable. One thing I think you can say and I think is a trend going forward is that … You need to be able to make better use of the resources across the SoC in the system.” (Watch the full RCR Wireless interview with Imagination Technologies here.)
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