"Ten core processor" just sounds great. When many friends buy a mobile phone, the salesman will mention how powerful the 10 core processor is and so on. But does the performance of mobile phone really depend on the number of processor cores? The 10 core Helio X25 of MediaTek is better than the 4-core Qualcomm snapdragon 820? Today's editor will talk with you about the processor performance.
If we look at the development history of smart phones, we can see that multi-core has a very positive role in promoting the performance development of mobile phone processors. From single core to dual core, to today's four core to eight core and ten core, the performance of mobile processor is improving every year. But it is not only determined by the increase of the number of processor cores. The overall performance of the processor is also closely related to its CPU frequency, architecture, process, GPU and DSP. For example, today's snapdragon 820, Qualcomm's flagship processor, performs much better than the Helio X25 / kirin955, which has more cores.
● processor frequency
Under the same conditions, the higher the frequency of the processor, the better the performance of the mobile phone. This is easy to understand: we regard the frequency of the processor as our walking. When the steps are the same, the higher the frequency of our steps, the faster we will walk. The same is true for processors, the higher the frequency, the faster the processing speed and the stronger the performance.
This is the difference between Helio X20 and Helio X25 of MediaTek, Qualcomm snapdragon 820 and snapdragon 821, Hisilicon kirin950 and kirin955. So the performance of terminals with different processors is different.
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There is a slight difference in the processor frequency between the standard version and the high configuration / top configuration version of Xiaomi mobile phone 5
So the better the dominant frequency of the mobile phone, the better? Of course not. In the early stage of the development of smart phones, many users have tried to over frequency to make up for the lack of the performance of mobile phone processors. After overclocking, the performance of mobile phone is indeed stronger, but there are also problems of power consumption, heat and stability. When chip manufacturers deal with their design, they will generally weigh all factors to develop a more appropriate CPU frequency to ensure that the performance, heating, power consumption and stability of the processor are maintained at a suitable value.
So from this point of view, low-frequency processors such as Helio P10 are also necessary.
● processor process
Another factor that has a huge impact on the overall performance of the processor is the processor process. Process is a representation of the distance between electronic components in a processor. So the process is more advanced (the smaller the number), that is, the smaller the distance between the electronic components, the more things we put in the chip. And the energy consumption of information exchange between electronic components is smaller. In this way, the thermal performance of the processor is naturally better.
So the more advanced the process, the better the processor's energy consumption and heating performance. Although it has little impact on the performance, these two aspects are particularly important because of the mobile phone's characteristics and volume limitations. This year, Qualcomm's snapdragon 820 processor uses Samsung's 14nm technology, which has good performance in energy consumption and heat generation, while TSMC's Helio X25 with 20nm is slightly worse.
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There is a certain energy consumption gap between Samsung 14nm and TSMC 16nm A9 processors used in iPhone 6S
However, there are occasional counter examples. For example, Samsung's 14nm performance on Apple's A9 processor is not as good as TSMC's 16nm FinFET in terms of energy consumption. One of the reasons may be that different companies have different calculation methods for the process, so this may exist when the digital gap is not very large; the other may be that Samsung's 14nm is not mature enough at that time.
● processor architecture
At present, the common processor architecture is arm and Intel's x86 architecture. However, with Intel's withdrawal from the mobile processor market, the current architecture is arm's unique situation. It's impossible for ordinary users to understand. Let's give an example of how architecture works and the benefits of advanced architecture!
The example that Intel president once said can explain this problem very well: an old structure with dominant frequency of 3G is equivalent to a 10 Lane urban highway, and a new structure with dominant frequency of 2.5G is equivalent to a 6-lane highway. The speed of information processing depends on the traffic flow. Although there are not many lanes of high-speed highway, the traffic flow is far greater than that of urban highway, so of course it is a new structure The advantages of construction are obvious.
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▲ Meizu pro6 uses 2 * A72 + 4 * A53 + 4 * A53, three clusters and ten cores
At present, all the processors on the market use arm's A53, A72 architecture or autonomous architecture. The three cluster processor Helio X20 / X25 of MediaTek uses two A72 cores + four high-frequency A53 cores and four low-frequency A53 cores. High performance architecture and high energy consumption ratio are used together to achieve the goal of both performance and energy consumption. While Qualcomm snapdragon 820 uses the autonomous architecture kryo SoC Based on armv8 instruction set. Although the performance is slightly lower than that of the public A72, it also achieves the purpose of balancing performance and energy consumption.
● GPU
Of course, as far as the current situation is concerned, the performance of each CPU is strong enough. The main display task of the graphics processor seems to be able to open the gap between the processors. This gap is more obvious when users play games.
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At present, Helio X20 / X25 and kirin950 / kirin955 of the common processors use mali-t88mp4, but there is a slight difference in frequency, so the GPU performance is slightly different. The Qualcomm snapdragon 820 uses a more powerful independent GPU, the Adreno 530, so it has obvious advantages when playing games. In addition, this year's popular low-frequency low-power processor Helio P10 uses the mali-t860mp2, so GPU performance is slightly worse.
Conclusion:
In addition to the above points, such as baseband processor closely related to wireless signal of mobile phone, digital signal processor (DSP) which can share CPU pressure, image signal processor ISP which has a great relationship with photo generation processing, and ram read-write performance, all of these will affect the actual performance of a hand processor. So when choosing mobile phones, we must not be fooled by "only core number theory"!