Gadgetory

hey guys if there's one thing we can't get enough of its speed well how do we accomplish that we can do that either with speeding things up in this case we're talking about processors so we can make them go faster or we can have more of them that's today's topic for the android guy weekly all right so like the other episodes let's get some terminology and vocabulary out of the way a CPU is a central processing unit it's the part of a computer or a smartphone because really those are computers these days or even a tablet that processes instructions now the term for it is CPU another term for it these days is a core we'll get to some differences there in just a minute so what this does is it processes instructions from programs or from apps the launcher being one a screen tap might be one instruction a a pinch-to-zoom might be another instruction go get my email might be another instruction answer this phone call so so those are instructions they all get processed through in fact there might be dozens of instructions for each one of those tasks we don't want to go into too much detail here we want to basically make everything faster right everybody's about speed they want things done instantly super fast okay great how can we make things faster so let's go back to what I just said I want to get that incoming call I want to pinch to zoom I want to check my email check my Facebook check my Twitter maybe upload something to YouTube all at the same time this is all happening in the background on my smart phone great that means there's a long line of instructions waiting to be processed through the CPU how can I make that faster all right time for an analogy you ready for this okay let's say you are getting on a subway now this subway has just one car the train is just one car long and it only has one door and there's 100 seats inside of it so far you with me okay now what's gonna happen is we need to get a hundred people through that door into that subway and off to the next stop where everybody's gonna get back off again still with me all right a hundred instructions or a hundred people in this case that's that's a long line you're gonna be waiting for a while to load up that subway car so how can we improve that how can we make it faster well first of all why don't we make that door wider so that people can get into the subway car a little bit quicker if the door is too narrow you know if some big guy like me is trying to get through the door well it's gonna take a little bit longer you know for whatever reason to get through then some smaller person a skinny person a child for example it's gonna take longer so we can make the door wider now that would be like the bandwidth to the processor okay how wide is that throughput how wide is that that channel to get into the processor we can change that the next thing that we can do of course we can make the subway faster so once everybody's loaded up it gets from point A to point B a lot quicker okay so that's that's cool we can do that to an extent but eventually we run into some complications like well if we go too fast the subways gonna jump the rails maybe crash into the side of the tunnel not good okay so there's a there's a theoretical maximum that we can go before we have to redesign the whole subway system to make that work all right so we can kind of do that we've maxed out our speed there what's something else we can do let's put in another door so now there's a door at the front and a door at the back great that door at the back that's our other core by the way or hang on to that we'll call that a hyper thread because we're still going into the same car all right so you've got the door in the front the door in the back now those hundred people they can get in two lines and in those two lines they can go in they're still going into the same car and now we can get the processes through twice as fast right but there's a little bit of a caveat there what happens if you have a family who's getting on you might not want to split up you and your wife or your kids into the two separate lines back you might have some people who have to get on after other people say a mother and father want to get on before their kids to make sure that all of their kids are there or maybe you have the dab get in first the kids and then the mom get in at that the last to make sure that all the kids got on okay that makes sense you don't want to split them up then put them at the other door well computer tasks are the same way there are some processes some instructions that have to be run in a specific order you can't split those up easily between two cores so you just kind of bundle them together into a single thread in that one line okay still with me all right what's something else that we can do well we can add another car in this case that would be another core and in this case we're gonna put you know two doors and it one in the front and one in the back so now we have four lines we can get a whole bunch of people in there even if the the cars are smaller if the cars are only 50 people each well we still have a hundred in that train and now we have four ways to get in we can get into people really really fast and then of course if we keep it at the same capacity or the same clock speed we can fit 200 people in the same space and just get a lot more people moving okay so there's our analogy it's all laid out and then we got kind of that all understood right okay now let's apply that to smart phones and tablets and computers so I've got a smart phone okay this smart phone is a dual-core smartphone that means it can run two processors at the same time but it's all on the same chip there's kind of a problem there okay once we put those two subway cars on the track it takes twice as much energy to pull those cars down the track right same thing with a dual-core phone or having two processors in a phone essentially you're doubling again theoretically you're doubling your your processing power but you're also doubling your energy requirements if they will completely discrete CPUs completely separate chips that would most likely be true there would be some advantages of that hey increased speed being one because you know that you've got two processors to push instructions through you don't have to wait as long so in the screen might be able to be off for a longer amount of time which will save you some power and some other things like that but you're a to get the processes in and down and through and it's great but that battery back there it's only so big once your battery's gone you're gone and having an extra processor and there might be a problem well dual core chips kind of negate that not entirely but to a certain extent you're essentially adding more transistors to one chip which is going to take more power but it's not going to take as much power as if you had two separate chips so there's the question and really the topic for this edition of the Android guy weakly how many cores do we need well for a long time I had a single core processor you probably did too unless you just jumped into the Android world today most of the phones out there up until about a year ago maybe a little bit more were single core and they work just fine because well it's a phone it's not all that complicated there's not a lot of processing that we do on it we don't do a lot of heavy lifting with them now compared to computers of yesteryear you have we do but in general the operating systems are lightweight they're intelligent these are risk sir so we have reduced instruction sets we just really grease the wheels to get things in and through the processor and on their way so that the phones feel fast and for the most part they do and that's great when you get multiple cores inside of a phone you're just greasing the wheels even more as long as your operating system supports it Android Ice Cream Sandwich does honeycomb kind of does Gingerbread not so much Froyo it was yeah we're not even gonna talk about throw you all right but dual core it works great I love it it doesn't really impact the battery that much I get about the same life out of this phone as I did on my g2 which is really really kind of cool you know this being so much faster and a bigger screen and yeah so cool the battery is a little bit bigger too but we're not going to talk about batteries today so let's get back to course so that's my smartphone next up I have 7.7 inch tablet now this tablet I do the same things than I do on my phone now on my phone I don't play a lot of games well not really in depth intense games I could but I don't I don't do a lot of heavy lifting I don't do video editing I don't do audio editing I don't do really processor intensive stuff it's just normal stuff and it runs through just as fast as I needed to it's great well I do the same things over here the only difference that I have is well the screens bigger so I need a bigger battery and I don't use this for phone calls now I do some video chat and whatnot on Google Chat but that's kind of not the point because I use my phone for voice calls more essentially that's a big smart phone okay until we talk about 10-inch tablets okay so here's a Motorola Xoom it's 10-inch very very similar in size battery life and whatnot to the Apple iPad now this is where things get interesting right now in both the Apple camp and the Android camp and we don't know so much about the Windows camp until Windows 8 comes out but we'll we'll reserve judgment on that for later these are essentially just big smart phones without the phone and that's so one of the things that I joked about when the iPad first came out it's just like the iPhone but bigger and without the phone and it was of course that's oversimplifying and it's being more humorous than anything but that's essentially true the apps are essentially the same of course they're designed a little bit differently to take advantage of the bigger screen but there's not a lot that you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a smart phone whether it's Apple or Android now we're starting to see that change okay and let me kind of a well skip past that a little bit video editing for example you can't do much of it a little bit sure but you can't do a lot on an iPad or even on an Android powered tablet but again 10.1 inch right I've got a laptop behind me that's 11 inches it's a netbook it's got a dual core processor in it this has a dual core dual core dual core all right so we've got all these dual core machines my laptop I do video editing on it's got a bunch of RAM it's got a relatively large harddrive 128 gig SSD which isn't huge but compared to what I have in my tablet you know it's about four times the amount but I can do video editing on it it's big enough it's got a keyboard I've got a mouse that goes with it I can do video adding it takes a long time to do video editing hence why I have a desktop computer that's a quad core with hyper threading so it looks like eight again I can do so much more stuff or the same amount of stuff so much faster depending on how you look at it because of the many cores so how much is enough and how much is too much and how much is not enough here's my thoughts hey but this is your part of the show use the comments down below you can use my my comments and I'm gonna tell you right now and either rebut those or agree with those or disagree with those share your thoughts with everybody else who's watching ok single core dual core a single core on a smartphone a very basic entry-level one I think is fine I don't think that's a problem and we've seen that in the past on a higher-end phone especially with bigger screens and high-definition screens like we talked about in the last episode dual core absolutely no doubt ok then we get into our small tablets small tablets dual core absolutely must single core pass them up if it doesn't have a single core or if it has a single core if it doesn't have at least dual core pass that puppy up big tablets ok 10 inch maybe even above when we get those that's where your tablet stops being a tablet or a big smartphone and it starts being a small computer you team it up with a keyboard you team it up with you know whatever else to make it more productive however you need to do that at that point it's less a smart phone and more a computer that's where dual-core absolutely quad-core probably okay and I might even say definitely once we get some apps that take advantage of multiple cores or that require multiple cores you're going to get to a point where you can't run some of these apps on a smartphone or even a small tablet because they just don't have enough processing power in them that's where bigger batteries come into play with the larger tablets and where those multiple cores 4/8 who knows how many are really gonna come into play and at that point you can truly replace your laptop computer maybe someday your desktop computer with a tablet as long as it's got the right peripherals to do it you need them to do so those are my thoughts now it's your turn like I said agree with them disagree with them host your own justify them and help everybody else who's watching this understand how you use your smartphone in your small tablet and your big tablet or if you don't have all three which one do you have what do you use how many cores do you think is enough how many of you think is ideal how many who think is too much let us know down in the comments and of course if you've got somebody who disagrees with you bring them on over to pocketnow.com and to the video so that they can comment and voice their opinion as well if you like contributing like this of course give the video a big thumbs up that will help share your views and that you like this video with your friends if you haven't yet subscribed to the channel make sure you do that we'll have a link at the end so you can and of course comment I can't stress that enough we love your comments and love your feedback so that has been this week's episode of the Android guy weekly we look forward to seeing you next time if you have suggestions or recommendations for a topic make sure you let us know you can contact me through pocketnow.com for pocket now I'm Joe Levi