Technology Android

[masta247]

It's still the most powerful android device, including tablets.

Even a dual core Krait is faster than the Tegra 3 so.. in the end it might turn out that HTC One S and most other upcoming Krait devices are already faster (or similarly fast) and more energy efficient.
4 A9 cores will do to your battery what Tegra 3 does to One X's battery - rape it. Unless it packs 2000mAh + it won't last as long as even the SGS2. Some cool tricks that Samsung claims to save the battery life might help but..
Krait cores are more efficient (28nm process technology) AND there are only 2 of them. What's not cool for Samsung? Quad core Kraits and A15s are due later this year and they're at least 40% more efficient per every clock cycle. That's really a huuge difference considering that the quad core Krait is set to run at anything in between 2ghz and 2,5ghz. If you do the math the architecture alone guarantees that they will be almost 3 times as fast as the new Exynos that is supposed to power the SGS3 as far as pure CPU calculations go.

Bear in mind that A9 is 2010 architecture, Tegra 3 is going to get replaced later this year because A9 is obsolete. Now the newest Samsung's chip is A9. Really, boo.
I'm 100% positive that they came up with it ONLY because people want quad cores now, even if they aren't as good. Also I think that they simply had to release that phone now as it was the only right business decision - they agreed to use the imperfect processor so they packed the best they had (marketing-wise). Hopefully the phone will shine in different ways (design, screen estate/size ratio, battery tech).

 

[Pittsey]

Yeah.... I don't know what to do. I don't want to lock into a 2 year contract with it, really.

 

[masta247]

We'll see. Maybe the SGS3 turns out to be really cool after all. We don't know what it'll be. A quad core A9 is still fast for an Android phone and it's amongst the fastest for the moment.

 

[ARon]

Fast or not I feel they did the wrong thing. The galaxy phone is supposed to be the best so go with what's new and what's best not something a little better.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

I was contemplating what my next phone would be and was seriously thinking of getting the SGS III. Now, I'm not so sure.

I found a deal yesterday which I'm telling my mum to consider (as she's looking for a new phone).

HTC One S (24 month contract on T-Mobile).
Free phone.
100 mins.
Unlimited texts.
1500MB data
£26/month (effective cost after 6 months free cashback redemption = £19.50/month)

She currently has a HTC Wildfire, and I think she'd benefit from having Vanilla Android instead of Sense UI because it's just so much more user friendly and simplistic; and she'd be using a bigger screen too. I'm tempted to get one for myself. Sim-free they are going for around £415 brand-new.

 

[dilla]

How was the GS2's battery life? Was it an efficient chipset or just a large battery?

 

[Casey]

I was contemplating what my next phone would be and was seriously thinking of getting the SGS III. Now, I'm not so sure.

I found a deal yesterday which I'm telling my mum to consider (as she's looking for a new phone).

HTC One S (24 month contract on T-Mobile).
Free phone.
100 mins.
Unlimited texts.
1500MB data
£26/month (effective cost after 6 months free cashback redemption = £19.50/month)

She currently has a HTC Wildfire, and I think she'd benefit from having Vanilla Android instead of Sense UI because it's just so much more user friendly and simplistic; and she'd be using a bigger screen too. I'm tempted to get one for myself. Sim-free they are going for around £415 brand-new.

Why not so sure? The SGS3 will be a brilliant phone. Plus, how can you make a decision for a phone that hasn't even been announced yet or had any specs confirmed? Jeez....

Also, the One S has Sense UI and not stock. There are no stock phones on the market right now from well known manufacturers other than the Galaxy Nexus.

 

[Casey]

How was the GS2's battery life? Was it an efficient chipset or just a large battery?

Pretty good. I regularly get 15-17 hours with moderate usage. It's not the greatest battery life ever, but it holds it's own against other high-end devices. Other than the Razr Maxx, obviously. I believe it's a 1650mAh. Hopefully the S3 will be closer to 2000, but we'll see.

The Razr Maxx is something like 3300. If it wasn't almost identical to the S2 in all other specs I'd probably consider getting it. Hopefully other manufacturers will be able to replicate that with more cutting edge phones.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Why not so sure? The SGS3 will be a brilliant phone. Plus, how can you make a decision for a phone that hasn't even been announced yet or had any specs confirmed? Jeez....

Also, the One S has Sense UI and not stock. There are no stock phones on the market right now from well known manufacturers other than the Galaxy Nexus.

I forgot to make the point that i'd be hoping to root it and flash CyanogenMod (should his team make a ROM for that device), or another ROM that is more stock/vanilla-like.

I think that quad-cores in phones have come too early as we only just saw dual-cores be announced not so long ago. I would've hoped that more phones could look at making duals better before moving onto quads. Im sure that most people won't even notice the difference between DCs and QCs unless its for something that needs all that processing power - none of which i can think of that are essential or available on mobiles devices. Video-editing maybe... From an economical perspective, I believe that the money can be better invested into making the most out of something that is 'inferior' (on paper) to make it a technically better product than something that is 'superior' but lacks the investment such as efficiency, power and so on. With chipsets becoming more efficient over time and batteries having larger capacities, life span should be increasing... simply put, i'm slightly put off by the rumour that the SGS III will have a Quad-Core. But there are no concrete details announced yet so i'm still anticipating 3rd May.

 

[Casey]

I think that quad-cores in phones have come too early as we only just saw dual-cores be announced not so long ago. I would've hoped that more phones could look at making duals better before moving onto quads. Im sure that most people won't even notice the difference between DCs and QCs unless its for something that needs all that processing power - none of which i can think of that are essential or available on mobiles devices. Video-editing maybe... From an economical perspective, I believe that the money can be better invested into making the most out of something that is 'inferior' (on paper) to make it a technically better product than something that is 'superior' but lacks the investment such as efficiency, power and so on. With chipsets becoming more efficient over time and batteries having larger capacities, life span should be increasing... simply put, i'm slightly put off by the rumour that the SGS III will have a Quad-Core. But there are no concrete details announced yet so i'm still anticipating 3rd May.

Naw, I don't agree. If you look at reviews of recent dual-core Android tablets..... the reviewers say they do notice the difference between them and the Transformer Prime, which has a quad core Tegra 3 chip.

Sure, they COULD make dual cores more efficient and optimise them in order to close a gap between dual core chips and quads, but will they? That remains to be seen. So if they don't....... then an unoptimised quad core chip will be better for you than an unoptimised dual core chip, obviously.

SGS3 will have a quad core chip. But it's also worth noting that it's a chip built by Samsung themselves and largely with the S3 in mind.

 

[masta247]

The difference between dual core vs Tegra 3 was because all of them were A9s and Tegra 3 was simply faster per core.

A dual core even with only slightly faster cores will outperform a quad core processor. The only case in which a quad core might have a slight edge is with extreme multitasking. Also Tegra will suffer from issues like lags while switching cores (between 4 tegra cores and the low voltage helper core) while solutions without the helper core are far less energy efficient because you need to supply power to each of the 4 cores whenever the CPU is running.

I'd like to bring an important case here - there are barely any apps that run on more than 1 core at a time and most of all most apps in the future WILL only run on one core at a time, so you would need 4 apps simultaneously using 100% of core's resources each to take advantage of a quad core processor. Manufacturers trick processors to run a single thread and load all cores equally but it doesn't work well at all. So basically if it comes to Android 1 demanding thread = 1 core.
So ironically you can have a dual core processor that is faster "per core", even if the unit as a whole is slower in multicore benchmarks and it will run apps faster unless heavy multitasking is being performed.
In short I believe that faster dual core processors are better for Android phones at the moment, but since Android is much less geek-centered these days and casual people buy high-end smartphones releasing a high end without a quad core processor would be a suicide, even though it's an inferior solution.

Since 1 Krait core is much more efficient than any A9 I believe that Snapdragon S4 is the way to go this year. In reality it will wipe the floor with any A9 X-core CPU, and most probably power hungry A15s (ARM's BIG.little will be Tegra3-style troublesome).
Qualcomm plan to use Adreno 320 as the GPU for their SOCs later this year and I believe that they have the ultimate mobile solution for this year, beating anything else and being released earlier than A15 competitors which despite being slightly faster will not be as energy efficient per clock cycle.

Summary for Sofi - Quad core A9 bad, Snapdragon S4 good, Qualcomm FTW in 2012.

 

[Casey]

Awesome. Thanks for the breakdown. What's your opinion on the TI OMAP 4430 chip? Some manufacturers initially began making dual-core devices with the Tegra 2, but then switched to the 4430.

 

[masta247]

It's the last gen A9 dual core, but compared to the Tegra 2 it's very similar. If I remember correctly the gpu was (ironically) slightly faster on the TI chip.

Other than that Nvidia failed with support of technologies like LTE and hardware codec support, which TI work fine with.
I suppose that's why manufacturers chose those chips.

 

[dilla]

The difference between dual core vs Tegra 3 was because all of them were A9s and Tegra 3 was simply faster per core.

A dual core even with only slightly faster cores will outperform a quad core processor. The only case in which a quad core might have a slight edge is with extreme multitasking. Also Tegra will suffer from issues like lags while switching cores (between 4 tegra cores and the low voltage helper core) while solutions without the helper core are far less energy efficient because you need to supply power to each of the 4 cores whenever the CPU is running.

I'd like to bring an important case here - there are barely any apps that run on more than 1 core at a time and most of all most apps in the future WILL only run on one core at a time, so you would need 4 apps simultaneously using 100% of core's resources each to take advantage of a quad core processor. Manufacturers trick processors to run a single thread and load all cores equally but it doesn't work well at all. So basically if it comes to Android 1 demanding thread = 1 core.
So ironically you can have a dual core processor that is faster "per core", even if the unit as a whole is slower in multicore benchmarks and it will run apps faster unless heavy multitasking is being performed.
In short I believe that faster dual core processors are better for Android phones at the moment, but since Android is much less geek-centered these days and casual people buy high-end smartphones releasing a high end without a quad core processor would be a suicide, even though it's an inferior solution.

Since 1 Krait core is much more efficient than any A9 I believe that Snapdragon S4 is the way to go this year. In reality it will wipe the floor with any A9 X-core CPU, and most probably power hungry A15s (ARM's BIG.little will be Tegra3-style troublesome).
Qualcomm plan to use Adreno 320 as the GPU for their SOCs later this year and I believe that they have the ultimate mobile solution for this year, beating anything else and being released earlier than A15 competitors which despite being slightly faster will not be as energy efficient per clock cycle.

Summary for Sofi - Quad core A9 bad, Snapdragon S4 good, Qualcomm FTW in 2012.

Say you use a tablet. I use an app to block WiFi in certain places. Say I also like to use Facebook. So the app I use to block internet for others is up and running in the background. I'm on Facebook and I see an interesting video shared with me. So I click on that and it takes me to YouTube. At the same time, I have sports and Twitter widgets on my homescreen, constantly updating with push notifications with sports scores and tweets.

Will this be considered as four fairly-demanding tasks? Maybe more? Will this run a.) the same, b.) faster, or C.) slower on a quad core 1.2 Ghz processor vs. a dual-core 1.2Ghz processor vs. a single-core 1.2 Ghz processor?

 

[masta247]

It's not about Ghz count because new gen 1ghz cores are faster than 1,5ghz A9 cores. But say that they are cores of the same speed.
A Youtube video is a fair task for a core and I suppose it would make 1 busy. Facebook, app to block wifi and widgets, I'm not so sure because they don't sound too demanding and they're set to run in the background and shouldn't be able to request too much power.
A dual core would have an edge over a single core of the same speed because the youtube video would work in the foreground (1 core) and everything else in the background (2nd core), so even if those background tasks slowed down for a split-sec you wouldn't feel that while watching a youtube video and in worst case scenario your widgets would update slightly longer, but you wouldn't feel that. You probably wouldn't feel a difference between a dual core and a quad core here, though perhaps it could get the background tasks done slightly faster but that's only if those widgets took the whole core, for example being poorly optimized and downloading huge chunks of data at the same time and refreshing content.

A typical situation where I can see a quad core processor having an edge is when you:
- Download a lot of huge files via your browser (so many that it would take almost 100% of a core, because for some reason downloading files is CPU intensive on Android)
- Unpack a rar file
- Watch a youtube video (foreground task)
- Have a business program counting something.

At the same time. Most probably still it wouldn't lag even on a fast dual core because background tasks would be performed on the second core but you wouldn't get those downloads ready as fast and analysis would get done much slower, and it would take more time for the rar to unpack. Here a quad core would have a huge edge as far as the completion speed of those background tasks goes but still not much for your own youtube watching comfort. If you know that you do more than 2 really CPU intensive tasks like those at the same time really often and you want the background tasks done as fast as it's possible then a quad core is better for you.

BUT doing only 2 of those things you'd get them done faster having 2 faster cores vs 4 slower ones (for example Krait vs Tegra 3). If you were watching a youtube video and unraring a file it would unrar faster on a dual core Krait because the core assigned to that task is simply much faster. Even an occassional widget refresh would get handled in the meantime as it'd probably take only a little CPU time, and the outcome would still be better on a faster dual core.

Most of all if there was a single, demanding app running an intensive task to perform in the foreground it would get done faster on a faster single/dual core vs even a slightly slower (per core) quad core. Unless the app was really optimized for running on quad cores which doesn't happen often on Android.

And that's considering you have ICS. With previous Android versions dual cores had no real edge over single cores other than some more raw computing power.

 

[S O F I]

Summary for Sofi - Quad core A9 bad, Snapdragon S4 good, Qualcomm FTW in 2012.

thanks. and which one is rumored to be in sgIII?

 

[ARon]

Unfortunately the quad a9

 

[masta247]

We don't know for sure but everything points to an A9 quad core.
As far as quad cores are concerned there's nothing newer than A9s, and Samsung most probably wouldn't want to go with a dual core, and I doubt that they're going to rush any newer quad core tech (though it would be awesome) for the Galaxy S3.

According to some first benchmarks the quad core Exynos is going to be faster than Tegra 3. The whole quad core unit is going to be about as fast as the first dual core Snapdragon S4.

This rumor is the only hope though: http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-exynos-big-little-cortex-a7-cortex-a15-28929/

 

[Casey]

There was a rumor that there will be a dual-core version of the S3 with a Qualcomm chip also.

 

[Flipmo]

Only a few more days...