Qualcomm calls out eight-core processors as 'dumb
Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)
Posts: 1,720
[h=1]Are they picking on the Propeller Chip?
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/367591/qualcomm-calls-out-eight-core-processors-dumb?page=0,0
Qualcomm calls out eight-core processors as 'dumb'[/h][h=2]Rival MediaTek is planning on releasing its own eight-core processor in the fourth quarter[/h]By Michael Kan, IDG News Service | Hardware, processors, Qualcomm 9
August 02, 2013, 3:45 AM Eight-core processors are "dumb," as the consumer wants an experience that comes from more than just throwing cores together, a Qualcomm executive said, referring to new eight-core chips announced recently.
"You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense," the company's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said, according to a transcript of his comments to Taiwan media provided on Friday.
Qualcomm focuses on giving consumers a good experience, which requires first good modems, next long battery life, and then an affordable price point, he added. Simply throwing cores together is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall, and seeing what sticks, he added.
The comments follow a launch by rival MediaTek of its new octa-core chip that it claims will offer better performance over competing processors.
Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, "We don't do dumb things."
"When you can't engineer a product that meets the consumers' expectations, maybe that's when you resort to simply throwing cores together," he said, adding "That's a dumb way to do it, and I think our engineers aren't dumb."
In response, MediaTek said its eight-core processor was just one of the company's latest breakthroughs in technology and innovation. Compared with its competitors, MediaTek claimed it had closer ties with the market, and as a result will release processors that meet customer needs.
"[The chip] has enhanced multi-tasking capabilities, and at the same time will also greatly improve the experience of your applications," MediaTek said in an email.
The company's octa-core processor will arrive in this year's fourth quarter. It differs from other octa-core processors in that it can use all eight cores simultaneously, according to MediaTek. The company claims this will help reduce the chip's power consumption, while improving its stability in processing applications.
In the past, Qualcomm has been vocal in defending its products from rival chips boasting more cores.
Both MediaTek and Qualcomm are competing to grab a bigger share of the chip market for smartphones and tablets by releasing new chips for both high and lower-end devices. Qualcomm has been riding on the success of its Snapdragon chips, which can be found in the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and the new Nexus 7 tablet from Google and Asus.
MediaTek chips are being used by vendors including Acer, Lenovo, and local Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi.
Samsung has also come out with an octa-core processor. Last month, it unveiled anupdated eight-core chip with a higher clock speed and better GPU.
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/367591/qualcomm-calls-out-eight-core-processors-dumb?page=0,0
Qualcomm calls out eight-core processors as 'dumb'[/h][h=2]Rival MediaTek is planning on releasing its own eight-core processor in the fourth quarter[/h]By Michael Kan, IDG News Service | Hardware, processors, Qualcomm 9
August 02, 2013, 3:45 AM Eight-core processors are "dumb," as the consumer wants an experience that comes from more than just throwing cores together, a Qualcomm executive said, referring to new eight-core chips announced recently.
"You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense," the company's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said, according to a transcript of his comments to Taiwan media provided on Friday.
Qualcomm focuses on giving consumers a good experience, which requires first good modems, next long battery life, and then an affordable price point, he added. Simply throwing cores together is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall, and seeing what sticks, he added.
The comments follow a launch by rival MediaTek of its new octa-core chip that it claims will offer better performance over competing processors.
Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, "We don't do dumb things."
"When you can't engineer a product that meets the consumers' expectations, maybe that's when you resort to simply throwing cores together," he said, adding "That's a dumb way to do it, and I think our engineers aren't dumb."
In response, MediaTek said its eight-core processor was just one of the company's latest breakthroughs in technology and innovation. Compared with its competitors, MediaTek claimed it had closer ties with the market, and as a result will release processors that meet customer needs.
"[The chip] has enhanced multi-tasking capabilities, and at the same time will also greatly improve the experience of your applications," MediaTek said in an email.
The company's octa-core processor will arrive in this year's fourth quarter. It differs from other octa-core processors in that it can use all eight cores simultaneously, according to MediaTek. The company claims this will help reduce the chip's power consumption, while improving its stability in processing applications.
In the past, Qualcomm has been vocal in defending its products from rival chips boasting more cores.
Both MediaTek and Qualcomm are competing to grab a bigger share of the chip market for smartphones and tablets by releasing new chips for both high and lower-end devices. Qualcomm has been riding on the success of its Snapdragon chips, which can be found in the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and the new Nexus 7 tablet from Google and Asus.
MediaTek chips are being used by vendors including Acer, Lenovo, and local Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi.
Samsung has also come out with an octa-core processor. Last month, it unveiled anupdated eight-core chip with a higher clock speed and better GPU.
Comments
Of course there are other things that need to be taken into consideration when designing a multi-core cpu. Every chip designer knows that. Time to make sure I don't have any Qualcomm stock in my portfolio. What an idiot.
The "lawnmower" thing is basically true. Throwing n cores together does not magically give you n times performance. It's an expression of Amdahl's law. It depends on if your memory subsystem has the bandwidth to handle them. It depends on if you apps and/or OS can make use of them. Etc Etc.
This says nothing about the Propeller. The Propeller can achieve petty much linear performance boost with cores because it is expected that normally each core is running it's own little driver code in a very isolated and parallel fashion. The important thing about 8 COGs is that they are providing the programmer with a huge simplification in not requiring him to worry about interrupts, or thread priorities or simply "running out of execution time" when he adds objects he has found int OBEX or else where to his application. The COGs provide for excellent decoupling of code modules which is nicely supported by the Spin language and even in C with it's Propeller libraries now.
But do note that if you spread a compute intensive algorithm, like an FFT, over 4 COGs you won't get 4 times the performance, or perhaps even three. Going to 8 is even less of the expected proportional improvement. At that point if you need such a an algorithm at speed you might have to move away from the Prop's 8 "lawnmowers" and get that "Ferrari".
I must admit that I'm not taken with the idea of the Java virtual machine in there. That's a huge waste of processor cycles right off the bat. But given the need to be able to run the same app on multiple processor architectures it's a reasonable solution. It's cheap and it does the job well enough. It does not lock you in to Apple. It's a doddle for developers to get going with. iOS is not even available for manufacturers to use. What else is there?
Both good point's.
I guess the app killing thing is a symptom of the limited resources in a phone/tab. Running multiple big apps on such a small device is bound to have problems.
I guess the jitters are down to the Java virtual machine and it's slow interpreter and it's garbage collector. I'm no fan of Java or it's VM.
Whilst I'm not an Angry Birds guy I have no expectation to be running huge word processors and such on my mobile phone or even a tab.
Thing is I'm from the generation where our first computers had memory measured in kilobytes and processors were a thousand times slower. I'm still amazed that a smart phone even exists and works at all so I'm a lot less likely to say anyone of them is badly designed or working.
The problem is not that there are limited resources, the problem is that android itself is poorly designed. As I noted above, Win2000/XP on same class hardware runs much faster, smoother and with better multi-tasking abilities, and no, it won't unload anything if it decides.
Symbian was using same "unload when I decide" kernel. And now it's dead. Expect android to die also. The tablet/smartphone market is very tasty one, so I don't think that giants like Wintel won't decide to chop a hefty piece from it.
I missed out on the PDP/11 but I had a good time with micro vaxs for a short while.
Clearly if you are wanting to run multiple large apps in a memory that is too small for them to fit something has to fail. Let's assume there is no swap space as getting into that brings things to a crawl. How politely it fails is another matter.
We might expect Windows and it's apps to run faster smother on similar hardware. I'll put that down to the Java VM and it's garbage collector. Mind you I have server processes written in JavaScript that surprisingly are not much slower than their C++ equivalents and show none of the garbage collector jitters of the Java VM so I wonder where Java got that wrong.
Android may well die off eventually. Perhaps not in the way you think. Google's ChromeOS could well be a replacement. We will have "web apps" running in browsers not operating specific apps. There is a big push for this and given the amazing things that can be done with HTML5 and JavaScript now a days I don't see why not. Just now I have been playing with compiling C++ Qt programs to JavaScript and they run quite well.
Intel may well make it into the mobile space one day, if they can get their power consumption down.
The MS and Windows future on mobile is not so clear. MS needs to collect money for Windows. With the price of mobile hardware on a spiral down to almost zero I can't see anyone wanting to pay for an MS OS when there are plenty of other options for free. If the "web apps" thing takes off then the browser is the platform and there is no need for an MS OS anyway.
But all this Android bashing is completely off-topic for this thread. Can we get back to cores, please?
I believe the Qualcomm guy was refering to ARM's little.BIG big.LITTLE concept, and not multicore in general. And there he may have a point. It is quite clumsy as currently implemented.
-Tor
You're right, it is marketing sniping, but it really is stupid of him to make such vague and general statements. It is far more likely to have a negative effect on Qualicomm than it's competitors. Certainly has for me.
As for the eight lawnmower/Ferrari comparison, who but Chandrasekher would be stupid enough to even make such a comparison. Single cylinder lawn mowers typically have single digit horsepower ratings.
Perhaps Chandrasekher would like to review his statement in the light of this lawnmower: http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2013/07/18/honda-builds-worlds-fastest-lawn-mower/
Edit: On reflection "the nail" became "a nail". The coffin was well and truely nailed shut the first time I ever saw an IBM PC.
Qualcomm may be on a fast track, but it just may be the wrong track. He may be right that the ARM 8 cores are dumb, but chasing the cellular phone market is eventually going collapse.
It isn't just the 8 cores that make Parallax Propellers a great chip, it is the fact that they provide the basis of one heck of a lot of learning.
Chips on Systems are far more powerful, but there is little to be learned when the makers don't want to share proprietary innovations with the average public.
What we need more of is a sustainable economy with sustainable business models based on satisfied customers driving sales as opposed to someone that twitters away sound bites and hit pieces about those that are doing something right.
Nothing wrong with 8 lawn mowers if you consider how few people can afford a Ferrari. And how many people really need a Farrari even if the engineering is great?
I suppose that the same executive thinks that screwdrivers are obsolete and everyone needs a cordless electric screwdriver. He just may not want to recognize that there are true advantages to small simple useful devices to drive a heck of a lot of creativity. And creativity is just about the only good thing left in the American business model. Most of the world is just following along.
We all do and say dumb things on the Internet. It is the nature of this new media to allow us to do so.
I'm still waiting for a processor whose core count goes to 11:)
BINGO. Now I think you have said something. Althouh it may mean something totally different to me than it does to you.
My feeling is that this world we are engineering for ourselves is not in any way sustainable. An exponential growth in everything has to go "POP" sometime soon. And then the few of us that survive are back to the stone age. But worse off becasue there are no resources to be easily had anymore.
I feel that deep down everyone has realized this although they dare not say it. As a result the plan is to "consume, consume, consume..." (To paraphrase Viv Nicholson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spend_Spend_Spend )To hell with the consequences let's party till we drop.
At least you keep an open mind.
You might be referring to the "business realities" management talk about when they shift focus from long term sustainability to larger bottom line numbers for a single quarter. I get this nonsense all the time in the quality and process biz. See Boeing 787 for next generation's text book example.
I did buy a 64 bit Core 2 Quad desktop and yet I find nearly all my work being doning on an Intel Atom in a Toshiba netbook.
Yes, if I need to compile Linux from scratch for my Cubbieboard, I have used the 64 bit Core 2 Quad with 64 bit Ubuntu, but most of the time it either just sits there unused or is picking up email.
So where exactly is the enhancement in the user's experience by all these hardware change ups?
What else is it supposed to do? If you have limited memory and limited disk space so something's got to give. And in any case the app is supposed to take care of that and receives plenty of warning from the OS. So, if you have any apps that lose data on an app kill that's a bug in the app.
How do you measure this general slowdowns and jitter? My app sometimes has a ton of GC going on (4 or 5 times per second) and with no noticeable performance delay.
The MS model was obviously not beneficial for the human race in the long run ever since 4K BASIC. Sorry I have not changed my mind about that.
As for the original IBM PC. I think everyone agrees it was a dog from day one.
Java does the same. You can see visible stutters in GUI apps when it hangs up to garbage collect.
I guess this probem is less if you have huge memory space for the GC to work in.
Strangely enough I have yet to notice JavaScript doing this, in the browser or on the server.
You know what? We don't care.
Perhaps, possibly, maybe MS has figured out how to run 10 GB of application code in 1 GB of memory space and without suffering the one thousand times or more slow down of swap disk.
Perhaps, possibly, maybe MS has the silver bullet to make all garbage collection stutters in apps invisible.
I don't not believe that is true, but let's assume so...
Well we don't care, we have a cheap OS, as in free, that works fine.
Well, that certainly did not improve my opinion of Microsoft any. Pretty idiotic way for anyone to behave. As for the lawn mower, well, that's pretty silly too. It's not that I don't enjoy having fun or going fast, I loved riding and racing my motorcycles and go-cart, but a 130MPH lawn mower is just ridiculous.