Qualcomm Shows Off Quad Core Krait APQ8064 at 1.5 GHz

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• alyarb - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  sploosh

• pSupaNova - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  Can you not load some Benchmarks on them when the reps are not looking....

• Brian Klug - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  Maybe :)
  
  -Brian

• name99 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  "The demo showed four 1080p videos being decoded on CPU for demonstrational purposes to load the cores - an actual shipping mobile platform would use hardware accelerated decode"
  
  So even Qualcomm and its entire marketing department can't actually find realistic useful quad-core tablet scenarios?
  Perhaps they should have spent a little more time on their own little.BIG or 2+1 chip (ie delivering something that meets people's actual needs) rather than going for pure bragging rights?

• metafor - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  I think the point was to demonstrate the variable clocking of all 4 cores. Since very little else will actually push multiple up to 1.5GHz.
  
  But I wholeheartedly agree with you. The whole quad-beast-core trend smacks of design-for-marketing. I'd much rather have 2x Krait and 2x Cortex A7 at 500MHz.

• douglaswilliams - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  So, you're saying that since current mobile phone software doesn't scale to four threads very well, chip designers shouldn't attempt to progress their technology?
  
  And you're saying that this chip won't meet your needs? What needs are those?

• name99 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  No I am NOT saying that --- read the damn comment.
  I am saying that the tradeoff made here was foolish and premature and that there exists obviously better tradeoffs.
  
  Phones and tablets are different from PCs, not least because of power constraints. This, together with the smaller screens, means there is much less running in parallel.
  
  Don't just tell me how wonderful quad core phones will be --- show me a concrete realistic user scenario for how they will be used. Do you have any suggestion beyond that good old catch-all "games will be faster"?

• lilmoe - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  i completely agree with everything you said... but implementing better power-saving technology (big.little for example) costs more and takes more time than than throwing 4 cores into the mix.
  on the other hand, qualcomm are arguing that their cpus scale well according to demand, both in miliamps and processing power, than nvidia's 4.1 implementation. so the current dual-core/quad-core krait implementations might not be as bad as we think it is. they've already said in this site that we've yet to see how the T3 and krait perform in power management and how much power they draw... time will tell.

• pSupaNova - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link

  AI, AI, And AI.
  There is a reason why a certian phone OS is called Android.
  
  At the present day Mobile chips are way underpowered for the things us software devs would like to deliver.
  
  Mobile devices unlike their desktop counterparts have lots more sensors that could benefit from more processing power unlike their thethered desktop counterparts .
  
  AI Assistants for Health, Driving, Speech, Teaching are some applications
  Realtime capture & processing of Images.
  Editing of Video (most phones have video cameras)
  VR Applications I bet Googles glasses could be changed to help the emergency services with realtime information overlays.
  
  And don't for get when these chips get more powerful they can make everday machines smarter think cars, houses, hoovers & the big dream of most futurists robots.
  
  You should be welcoming this race, Also manfacturers could always under clock the cores to save on battery.

• mythun.chandra - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link

  This isn't unlike what we saw on the desktop side of things, with the advent of multi-core devices. As tablet and smartphone usage models mature (and become more PC-like), it's easy to see how having multiple cores could make the end user experience better. That, and except under (rare) use cases which peg all 4 cores at a 100%, quad-core, if implemented correctly, will actually help battery life.
  
  As an aside, it was a bit funny/strange seeing quite a few Qualcomm engineers stop by the NVIDIA booth at CES, asking about how we were making use of 4 cores in our demos :)