Demler: Quad Core is Just For Marketing; Intel Will Not Succeed in Mobile

By SemiWiki

October 16, 2014

At Memcon today Mike Demler of the Linley Group (and coincidentally someone who used to work for me back at Cadence and who now run Memcon, small world) gave an interesting presentation on Trends in Mobile Processors. A mobile application processor (AP) is a highly integrated SoC to run the applications in a mobile device. Mostly they run Android or iOS although there are a few other mobile operating systems around. The AP always contains MMU, GPU, ISP and VPU but increasingly they might contain cellular baseband (typically LTE these days), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS although sometimes those are on separate chips. The power is 2W or less in a phone, 4-5W in a tablet.

Starting with Samsung's Exynos Octa these often contain four main cores or up to 8 in the ARM big.LITTLE configurations. All cores get counted since all can be running at the same time (initially big.LITTLE could only run the big or the little out of each pair). The smallest cores are slower but consume a lot less power (and area). For example, Cortex-A7 is 3.5x more efficient in MIPS/W and 2x in MIPS/mm2.

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