The emergence of smart phones has brought dramatic changes in people's work, communication and entertainment. Of course, the main purpose of the “mobile phone” is still to make and receive calls, but our mobile devices are increasingly used for other purposes and multiple applications, such as e-mail, social networking, and various applications. , Web browsing, and games and audio and video features. All the information we need for real-life and virtual worlds, at our fingertips, has never left the computer network or smartphone.

This principle is very simple. The various tasks we place on mobile devices and our ever-increasing needs and desires must be more powerful. Our smart phones have switched from single-core processors to dual-core processors. Now that we have seen the introduction of stable four-core mobile devices, it is bound to have eight or even sixteen core processors in the future. It is true that we see that the four-core Android mobile devices will become the mainstream of the current market; Soon, Apple, Nokia, WindowsPhone mobile device processor, will also move toward more core. Having said that, we are talking about some basic features of the mobile device quad-core processor. But in some special cases, more kernels will actually lead to a poorer user experience.

What is a quad-core processor?

As the name suggests, the quad-core processor is a system chip (SoC; SystemonaChip/SystemonChip) with four CPU cores. Each "core" is a single ARM processor, four put together to establish a complete system chip. The processor architecture designed by ARM is a chip that can be applied to almost all smart phones in the world. You can see that for many years advanced ARM core processors, each iteration generates more powerful processing power.

Therefore, it is clear that dual-core Cortex-A15 processors will have more powerful features and processing capabilities than dual-core A9 processors; quad-core A9 processors (such as NVIDIA's Tegra3) will be more powerful than dual-core A9 processors ( Such as NVIDIA's Tegra2). Many vendors can't buy the basic structure that is suitable for adjusting the ARM design to set the 4+1 core for NVIDIA Tegra, because it uses a fifth core with low power activities to provide extended battery life and energy efficiency.

We expect quad-core processors We always require processors with higher performance and lower power consumption. At the most basic and ideal levels, we expect that the number of cores will double. For example, from dual-core to quad-core processors, the processing speed of running applications will be twice as fast. The above assumptions are true if there is an equal sharing of tasks. Unfortunately, this has not happened so far. The operating system itself needs to be allocated to support the "multi-threading" task. It also requires all kernels to handle it.

In addition, debugging the complexity of the application creation for multi-core processing is not only difficult to write this code, it is also error-prone and makes code maintenance more difficult. Therefore, the doubling of the processing speed is almost impossible to happen. However, there is no doubt that the efficiency of the four cores will be greatly improved, but only for the use of multi-core corresponding applications.

Another important concept, many people expect is to double the number of cores, for example: from dual-core to quad-core processors, can significantly increase the battery life of the device, because each core requires less battery power? The battery life that users should enjoy will increase significantly? Under ideal conditions, the above assumptions should be established. However, in reality, processors are more energy-efficient and power-saving, but monitors and wireless network organizations are not more power-efficient.

Because each high-profile smart phone uses high-frequency and high-resolution color displays, it needs more power; and wireless networks upgraded from 3G or 3.5G to 4G have an impact on battery life. The quad-core smartphones are so repeatedly operated that the efficiency of the battery is greatly increased, but there is no significant improvement in battery life (compared with dual-core smartphones).

We have already seen that a considerable number of mobile devices are using classic PC games, and there are also a large number of intensive graphics games that can be applied to Android devices. With more and more such games and audio and video information, mobile devices using quad-core processors are expected to provide significant improvements in the user's sound and light gaming and audiovisual experience.

Quad-core mobile devices fully satisfy our only area: games. Most game applications use the advantages of multi-threaded design, so the number of cores increases, and it also provides a more efficient and smoother gaming experience. In addition, hardware and software must be fully collaborated with each other. On this point, NVIDIA specializes in first-class hardware knowledge and collaborates with software developers to truly create an excellent gaming experience under multi-core operation. The Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core processor and Samsung Exynos processor, Huawei Huawei K3V2 processor lineup will continue to upgrade. They undoubtedly represent future mobile device processors, taking a big step in CPU technology, and let's wait and see.