Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe the android guy why are some quad core chips not performing as fast as some of their older non quad core chips in today's modern tablets and smartphones that's a very complex topic but we'll try and scratch the surface in today's android guy weekly okay so let's start with a couple misconceptions first of all megahertz and gigahertz aren't everything they help but they're not going to influence your speed as much as chip architecture second cores doesn't matter if it's dual core tricor quad core heptachlor doesn't really matter cores help with one specific thing and not for general everyday stuff and I know that's just made a whole bunch of you bristle but hang on with me okay so let's go back and talk about topic number one the first thing we've got is megahertz oh the megahertz myth the faster you run something the better it is that's that's the myth and it really is a myth the faster you run something doesn't necessarily translate into the faster you get things done in fact especially when we're talking about Mobile smartphones in particular tablets a little bit less because I've got such a big battery in comparison ultrabooks notebooks netbooks all that stuff the faster you run something the more power it takes the more heat it puts off and the more battery life gets sucked down when you're trying to do that with a big asterisk there okay that big asterisk is to combat that energy-sucking heat creating run it faster run it faster you have make it smaller the smaller you can make a chip or an entire system generally speaking the less heat it puts out and the faster you can run it the less power it takes all that stuff so if you want to go faster you've got to make it smaller if you make it smaller well there other things that you run into there but that's the gist of it you combat your heat you can bat your power consumption by making things smaller look at the chips that we have today I mean they're the size of a thumbnail and they'll do what we were doing with desktop processors that were how big were they size of a silver dollar just a few years ago it's ridiculous how small we've gotten and how efficient we've gotten things and it really really is great hey so that's that's kind of that the megahertz myth that comes into a special importance let's say when we're talking about mobile devices because when when you're on mobile megahertz and gigahertz aren't as important as battery life and efficiency now I don't know if you've ever done this or not but if you've got if you've got a phone or a tablet that will let you go in and look at the processor speed usually that means you've unlocked it and you might even be running a custom rom or a custom kernel at the very least but you can actually look and see how fast your processor is running now unfortunately it's not going to let you do it all the time there are some apps that put a little water mark up that shows you you know how fast is your processor running when it's doing process X Y or Z but most of the time you're just opening up the app and you're looking at it and seeing it it's idle state and that in fact is kind of indicative my galaxy nexus which is sitting right back there usually runs at about 350 megahertz now I turn it on I look at it and 350 megahertz whoa what's going on here it's a dual-core 1.2 why is it only running at 350 megahertz so here's what I'm talking about this is my phone and it's right now running at 350 megahertz it's got an interactive governor I believe which means it's going to scale up and down as necessary and there you see it just scaled up to 700 and back down to 350 so it's not doing enough right now that I really need any more processing power than 350 megahertz so why would we want to have a 1.2 well there are K is where I need a 1.2 and what I'm doing really graphics intensive stuff video decoding being really core among those no pun intended there but when I'm doing video decoding I've got not only video which this is an HD screen so that requires quite a bit just because of the raw number of pixels they're also the frame rate that's coming in at 29 30 frames per second and then I've got audio that I need to decode as well well that's an awful lot of stuff if we just count it up there's the operating system and all the idle stuff that goes on in the background the video decoding and the audio decoding and then the displaying of that and the playing back of the sound well it sounds like six or eight things and in that case it makes sense then really helps out to have multiple cores that I can split all of these processes across you remember way long ago when you were watching stuff that you're streaming well you'd watch the video and it would sputter and hesitate and a lot of times people thought that was a problem with their bandwidth with their connection speed and sure a lot of times it was but even more people didn't realize this it was because their system their processor and ram and and the whole thing working together couldn't keep up with the demands that we're putting on it so the audio would be choppy or the video would drop frames so it could keep up with all of it because it just didn't have enough power to run it all at the speed that it needed to to be nice and smooth and well smooth and buttery like we know ice cream sandwich is supposed to be so let's look at another analogy here okay let's say I've got a really fuel-efficient commuter car you know I don't drive very very far I don't drive it on the freeway I just drive it on the surface streets it's a three cylinder doesn't have that great of a transmission doesn't have that great of a suspension or handling or whatnot but it gets me where I need to go fabulous well let's say that this car manufacturer wants things to go even faster they want to appeal to a bigger group of people that are honestly they're buying their competitors car because holy crap that one's fast well what do they do they take out that in line three cylinder engine they replace it with a v6 oh no no no let's go even more than that let's do a v12 so they put a v12 in the same chassis in the same car you got the same size gas tank you've got the same tires the same suspension the same transmission everything it's the same as the old car just a bigger engine now what's going to happen here sure now you can go well let's go back to our analogy first if I'm getting to work I can get to work driving 30 miles an hour I can get to work driving 120 miles an hour of course when I'm doing 120 I'm gonna get there faster right but I can still get there doing 30 and well maybe when I'm driving on the road it's during rush hour and I'm not even topping out at 30 miles an hour I'm 2015 who knows what but I can't even max out my little commuter car so why would I want to have this super fancy car with a v12 or even a commuter car with a v12 I'm not going to be able to take advantage of it well that's one scenario but let's go back to the car now in order for me to go 120 miles an hour I have to have an infrastructure that's built to support that I have to have good roads hey my 30 mile commuter car works just fine on dirt roads which I don't drive on dirt roads by the way but you get the point there to do 120 you've got to have better roads you got to have a better Road base you got to bet have better better pavement you know less potholes your curves have to be smoother and wider rather than you know tight curves you can do it lower speeds you might have to bank the terms or the curves to be able to keep the car on the road you've got to have ways for other people to get onto the road and off of the road very smooth and fluidly you know no stop signs here on this street okay so in this analogy the infrastructure is the apps it's the operating system it's all the stuff that we're running on the architecture on the chips and whatnot so if we don't have apps if we don't have an operating system that takes advantage of and really exploits all the been it's of in this case multi-core processors or in our other case you know the super fast car it doesn't do us any good it's driving a Ferrari in Main Street during rush hour just doesn't make it looks nice sure hey about that but it's not going to do what the car was designed to do so back over here if we have our our super cool souped-up commuter car with a v12 in it it's just not going to work right you put that next to the Ferrari on the Autobahn and that poor little car is probably going to blow itself to pieces because it just can't handle it all but that's kind of what we're doing so what do I mean here let's switch back over to technology the cortex a9 processor is a good processor it's been around for a while and when I say the processor I mean the architecture because lots of people license that architecture and build their own chip based off of it some people are even whoa making quad core systems out of it it really wasn't designed to do a quad core just like our commuter car wasn't designed to do v12 but they're doing it and it works and they've done a little bit better job than I did making my commuter card because I haven't seen any of them explode yet probably won't but what we've got there is still kind of an older technology well let's come over to the a-15 a 15 is newer technology it's faster it's smaller it's got all of these added benefits that the a9 never had but all these companies have been busy building on top of the a9 with more cores and whatnot that they haven't been able to keep up to speed or keep up to date rather with the a-15 technology so an 8-15 quad-core hey that'd be awesome but everybody's building a 9 quad cores because it takes a while to bring one of those to market you with me ok so that's kind of answers the question and this was sent in by one of our viewers why is a quad core a9 so much slower than an a 15 well it's because the a-15 was designed differently it was designed for the new roads that those smartphones and those tablets are running on whereas it's kind of more of a marketing gimmick to put multiple cores on to an older architecture you know that a nine and what not so what about the Tegra 3 the Tegra 3 is amazing it's awesome we saw all kinds of of demos and benchmarks and holy schmoly that thing just blew everything away but in practice not so much why is that while the benchmarks and and all the demos that we were shown were optimized to run on that Tegra and all the stuff that's out there right now is not it's optimized to run on everything that it can run on if you are an app developer what would you rather do do you rather have one app that runs on everything and by everything I mean we're talking what 18 gazillion I think is the number of Android users out there so 18 gazillion people are buying your app for a dollar so now you're an 18 gazillionaire who sends them over that to me I'm Joe the android guy over pocketnow.com if you anyway so when you're on the other side you can make your appt super awesome with bells and whistles galore and run it on a Tegra 3 and make it look fabulous amazing awesome but you've only got 13 people that are running it so now if all 13 of those people buy it you make $13 go out and grab a nice lunch so you see you see where I'm going with this we need to have common a common infrastructure we need to have a common core we need to make sure that the cars that are running on our roads all can run on the roads efficiently and well but when we need performance the performance is there the marketing gimmick is more cores more of course have their place they do help you take that Ferrari out on the track and you're going to love it but when you're commuting in it not so much but when going with more advanced chips you know the a-15 we're getting some advantages there that you might not have by just going with an a 9 quad-core Tegra 3 is somewhere between those it's not really yeah it's it's own thing it has its own challenges and it's trying to compete in this this whole ecosystem that already exists it's doing pretty darn good but it still has room to really take advantage of what it can do we need to have more apps out there that can take advantage of it just like we need to have more racetracks out there more autobahns out there to take advantage of that Ferrari so I hope that makes a lot of sense maybe just a little bit of sense for you analogies between cars and computer chips don't really hold up all the time but it kind of helps communicate the differences between them because more people understand car engines and understand you know computer architecture at least I think so maybe not if that's not the case let me know in the comments okay now a lot of this stuff has been generalized not specific so I know that there are some some technical inaccuracies between what I've said in the a9 a-15 the Tegra 3 and whatnot but for the case of making things simpler for more people to understand that's why I've presented them the way that I have if there's something that you just can't stand that I said that you think was just completely wrong or would like to clarify again please leave a comment down below use the time mark so we can go back and I'll reference that did you know that on YouTube you can put like one call in one for space whatever and it'll hyper that hyperlink that to that particular point in the video yes you can do that on youtube so you guys who are watching the video over a pocket now you can comment down below but of course you've got to take advantage of a hyper linking to the time over on the YouTube comments so about that this kind of wrapped up three user comments into one relatively long video I apologize for that guys but they were also similar so related that I thought I'd just lump them all together the point that I want to make here is the the inspiration for this video came from you it didn't come from me it didn't come from anyone over at pocket now this came for you this pocket cast is for you I said pocket cast we don't even have that anymore the android guy weekly is for you that's why we put so much emphasis on the comments we want you to comment we want you to contribute we want you to ask questions we want you to send in recommendations for upcoming episodes I know we can't get to every single one in this case we got to about three of them and for those that sent them in thank you you know who you are I appreciate it fabulous topic just so in depth that I hope I did it justice and I hope I answered your questions for you it's that good all right leave your comments thumbs up the video if you liked it thumbs up the video even if you didn't like it and thumbs up the video if you like fast cars and car analogies I think I covered everybody out there head over to pocketnow.com so you can read the article relating to this video and to get up to date on news tips tricks solutions everything that you would want not just for Android but for all of the major os's smartphones and tablets I'll like four pocket now and the android guy weekly i'm joe levi you