Analysis on the development trend of smartphone octa-core battle

Although quad-core smartphones are still in the popularization stage, the battle for octa-core has quietly begun. As time entered the second half of 2013, when the battle for CPU and main frequency of smartphones was showing signs of fatigue, MediaTek released the world's first "true octa-core" processor MT6592. This undoubtedly stirred up the nuclear war in smartphones.

　　MediaTek, a rising star in the global mobile phone processor field, officially released the octa-core processor MT 6592 before its big brother Qualcomm. This processor has not yet been put on the market, but it has already aroused a lot of tension in the industry.

　　The market has mixed reactions, with some praising and some criticizing. Some people think that no matter whether the eight-core processor is useful or not, it is at least worth the "gimmick" for mobile phone manufacturers and consumers. Some analysts say that the saturation of market demand will hinder the popularization of the eight-core processor. Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president of Qualcomm, said that Qualcomm has no plans to launch an eight-core processor at this stage, and even believes that blindly pursuing the number of cores is stupid and meaningless. However, Huawei HiSilicon said it would follow up and launch an eight-core processor in the second half of this year.

　　Qualcomm's point of view is similar to what Intel said when it launched the Atom Z2480 single-core 2GHz processor - the number of processor cores is not the only thing that matters, efficiency is king.

　　ARM architecture is the deciding factor

　　According to ARM's overall strategy, at least in the short term, the A15 octa-core is aimed at IT products such as servers, rather than smartphones. ARM has prepared large and small core configurations for smartphones, and manufacturers can use 4+4 dual quad-cores to build their own mobile phone processors. The octa-core processor Exynos 5 Octa, the flagship smartphone Gal-axyS4 released by Samsung in March this year, uses this 4+4 structure. This 4+4 core is not actually a true octa-core, because it can only have a maximum of 4 cores working at the same time. MediaTek's octa-core processor MT6592 does achieve the simultaneous operation of eight cores, but it uses eight A7s, which is a bit little.little, that is, it integrates eight small cores, and its actual performance remains to be verified. If Qualcomm wants to develop an octa-core processor, it will need a new architecture to reasonably arrange the eight cores. It is unlikely that Qualcomm will follow the octa-core craze before ARM launches a new architecture.

　　The balance between power consumption and performance

　　This is an era of excess hardware performance. For mobile phones, most software can run normally even on a single core. However, the corresponding reason is "most" - most software is not designed and optimized for multi-core parallelism.

　　Increasing the number of cores will also bring another problem, which is power consumption. The more cores a processor has, the more difficult it will be for manufacturers to implement power consumption management strategies.

　　After the launch of the Samsung S4 octa-core version using Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processor, users have been complaining about power consumption and heating issues, which are caused by this immature pseudo octa-core processor.

　　Future direction selection

　　Today, the performance of quad-core and octa-core processors is far ahead of the needs of software and applications. In the future, some chip manufacturers may focus on GPU upgrades and overall performance optimization.

　　Apple has chosen to put GPU upgrades at the same level as or even higher than the processor, and this is likely to be the route Qualcomm will choose for some time to come.