By: Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar), May 2, 2017 3:13 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on May 2, 2017 11:32 am wrote:
> Did you own smartphone or tablet 3-4 years ago?
> What CPU it had ? ARM Cortex-A9 at 1.2 GHz? Or, at best, Qualcomm Krait 300 at 1.5 GHz?
> Was it sufficient for voice call UI/web browsing/Waze/WhatsApp and occasional Goggle Maps?
> Is Zephyr slower or faster?
> If your answers are what I think they are then, may be, many
> iPhone users will never see their Hurricane fired up?
Even if a Zephyr is as fast as a 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 it doesn't follow that Hurricane shouldn't be powered up if they only use their iPhone for simple stuff like voice calls, browsing, etc.
Just because Zephyr is designed to save power on idle tasks doesn't mean has better performance/W across its whole range. Spinning up a Hurricane core for a short time then quickly back to sleep may use less power than keeping Zephyr running flat out for a much longer period of time.
From what we can tell from Anandtech, Twister had two speeds, full clock and 50% clock. We don't know if that's still the case for Hurricane, or if it offers a wider range. We also don't know what the range of clock/power choices Zephyr has. Heck, we don't even know if Zephyr is fully separate cores like big.LITTLE, or if they are more integrated than that. So it is kind of hard to make any pronouncements about Zephyr when we know nothing about it - for all we know it is OOO, just narrower than Hurricane and with more ability to switch clock rates...
> Did you own smartphone or tablet 3-4 years ago?
> What CPU it had ? ARM Cortex-A9 at 1.2 GHz? Or, at best, Qualcomm Krait 300 at 1.5 GHz?
> Was it sufficient for voice call UI/web browsing/Waze/WhatsApp and occasional Goggle Maps?
> Is Zephyr slower or faster?
> If your answers are what I think they are then, may be, many
> iPhone users will never see their Hurricane fired up?
Even if a Zephyr is as fast as a 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 it doesn't follow that Hurricane shouldn't be powered up if they only use their iPhone for simple stuff like voice calls, browsing, etc.
Just because Zephyr is designed to save power on idle tasks doesn't mean has better performance/W across its whole range. Spinning up a Hurricane core for a short time then quickly back to sleep may use less power than keeping Zephyr running flat out for a much longer period of time.
From what we can tell from Anandtech, Twister had two speeds, full clock and 50% clock. We don't know if that's still the case for Hurricane, or if it offers a wider range. We also don't know what the range of clock/power choices Zephyr has. Heck, we don't even know if Zephyr is fully separate cores like big.LITTLE, or if they are more integrated than that. So it is kind of hard to make any pronouncements about Zephyr when we know nothing about it - for all we know it is OOO, just narrower than Hurricane and with more ability to switch clock rates...
