Octacore phones?

[peeeej]

I'm just wondering. How come phones get to have 8 cores easily, while for PC's it's so much more expensive and is much more powerful? What's the difference between the "core" of a phone and a cpu. Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question. My english is not that good.

[XenosTech]

18 minutes ago, peeeej said:

I'm just wondering. How come phones get to have 8 cores easily, while for PC's it's so much more expensive and is much more powerful? What's the difference between the "core" of a phone and a cpu. Sorry if this sounds like a stupid question. My english is not that good.

Smaller processors are easier to manufacture hence why phones have 8 cores so easily and pc's don't, plus the architecture differences

[tlink]

because their cores are not comparable. there is way more to a cpu than just cores.

[manikyath]

there's cheap octa core processors for computers, but these are usually only found in low power and/or embedded applications.

 

it's mostly about use case, but i feel a slightly bigger theory lesson is in order:

 

first: the majority of phones use ARM, which is a RISC architecture, whereas desktops (almost) exclusively use x86 which is a CISC architecture, for the sake of briefness i'll not go into the details between them (google can do that for you), but in essence this already makes them not really comparable.

 

second: a lot of these 8-core phones have what's very creatively called "big small" architecture, which is a marketig term for a very powerful quadcore, and a very low power quadcore ducktaped together, giving these phones the ability to fully shut down the powerful cores during idle time for extended battery life, and run those 4 powerful cores at full tilt for resource hungry applications. they're not really a true octa core, but rather two quadcores that the phone can turn on and off depending on the needs.

 

third: for most people, more than 4 cores on the desktop is a waste of money, since 4 x86 cores can easily provide the horsepower needed for what most of us do, and a lot of very cpu hungry applications (pointing at games here as well) arent actually very good at using more than 4 cores, with the exception being some video rendering and editing software packages, a small selection of games, and other purpose-written applications like stuff for machine learning etc.

 

fourth: ARM is a very low power architecture, for example the quadcore chip on the raspberry pi is only a few watts, whereas x86 is much more powerful, and power hungry, with for example the i5 7600 listed as 65watt TDP. needless to say, if you'd take twice the cores, you could estimate about twice the expected power draw & thermal output.

 

fifth: intel (sorry amd folks, you lot dont have enough material to work with..) has two specific ranges of processors where they have higher core counts (8, or even more), more specificly the high cost "enthousiast" and server grade chips we all know, but lesser known (and arguably more important) are their lower power atom chips, which tend to implement a greater amount of lower power cores, for specific applications that are easily made multicore optimized (which isnt a thing in a lot of fields) and where lower power draw is desirable. it's easier to make more less powerful cores have a higher total performance per watt than having fewer more powerful cores. they dont really see the mainstream market, because they're fairly useless on the mainstream market. they usually end up in enterprise grade network equipment, in enterprise firewalls, small buisiness NAS units, etc. if you know where to look you can pick up a board with an 8-core atom for not overly much money (they're all soldered options, they dont have sockets.) but you're honestly better off getting a lower core count chip because chances are your workload cant even properly use all 8 cores.

 

 

there's probably a few errors in there because i slept terribly, but that at least should draw the picture

[LAwLz]

You're basically trying to compare a bicycle to a motorcycle, by only looking at the number of wheels they got.

I mean, just look at the size of your desktop CPU vs the size of your phone, not to mention the power consumption.

 

It really should be quite obvious why one can be more powerful than the other.