Andrei Frumusanu (andrei.delete@this.anandtech.com) on August 17, 2018 9:48 am wrote:
>
> Confusing peak power consumption is TDP/average power is akin to confusing a 15W TDP
> of an Intel mobile chip, let's say an 8250U, with its actual peak power of 35W+.
>
> Also, upscaling is not done by either CPU or GPU, it's a fixed function unit block;
> that's available in any SoC. The datasheet for your particular one: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/6/60/Rockchip_RK3399_Datasheet_V1.6-20170301.pdf


N-ai fost atent la ce am scris.


You did not pay attention about what I have written. The video upscaling power consumption was not in RK3399 but in a Samsung Exynos, which did not have any documentation or open source drivers for its GPU/VPU so I could not use whatever fixed function block it certainly had.

You may be technically correct that the video processing function are outside the Mali GPU in the strict sense of the word, but all those blocks are licensed from ARM and configured together with the Mali GPU, so when there is no need to make a distinction, when you refer to Mali you refer to all its components.


As i was talking about upscaling a video, it should have been obvious that I was not talking about a peak power. That was a long term average power. In fact that board was used 16 hours per day and it maintained that 12 W per 4 core power consumption for 16 hours. I said that this was the power consumed by the cores, so it was not the system power consumption. The board had maybe 3 W power consumption when idle (active idle, not sleeping) and the power consumption increased to about 15 W while the program for video upscaling was running on all 4 large cores. Like I said it stayed at that level all the time and of course this required a cooler for the processor, to prevent throttling. Inside a phone such a power could not have been maintained for a long time.

I did not try to run a program which draws maximal power on that SoC, a.k.a. a power virus. Such a program would have certainly caused an even higher power consumption than a simple video upscaling algorithm which just computed an interpolation formula while reading and writing the pixels.