My guess is that it will not be a quadcore in the Pyra, but a dual core OMAP5 from TI. Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung are not interested in selling their SoCs to small-scale projects like ours. OMAP5 would be just as cutting edge though, it has a Cortex-A15 just like the Tegra 4 and Exynos 5. The difference between 2 cores and 4 cores is not as big as it seems. Sure, 4 cores can get hot and drain your battery quicker, but you can only really get more performance out of it if you do lots of multitasking on it, or if you can run software on it that isn't bottlenecked by a single thread or by the GPU.will there be a new pandora with a quad core? or is pandora on the decline with so many android devices out now? if there was one with a tegra 4 or quadcore snap dragon or something pandora would be o nthe leading edge again due to it's battery life and controlls.
I don't think that is possible as this is a small niche developed and built by a small group of people, vs a big corporation that are selling in the millions.. Not to mention I can argue that a smart phone isn't cheaper than the Pandora especially in the US.. I know the "Data" plan alone out of my phone bill could buy a Pandora a year on top of paying $200 dollars upfront for it.it would also be ncie if it was inthe 300 USD range isntead of 500 USD, that or it would need some serious CPU/GPU power for 500 USD.
Outside of a very small margin cores that aren't used don't use power.Sure, 4 cores can get hot and drain your battery quicker, but you can only really get more performance out of it if you do lots of multitasking on it, or if you can run software on it that isn't bottlenecked by a single thread or by the GPU.
Sure, but what's the point of having extra cores if you don't use them?Outside of a very small margin cores that aren't used don't use power.Sure, 4 cores can get hot and drain your battery quicker, but you can only really get more performance out of it if you do lots of multitasking on it, or if you can run software on it that isn't bottlenecked by a single thread or by the GPU.
Your original statement was still misleading. You said it'll use more power but you only get more performance in some cases. Strongly implying that you always use more power. You didn't say anything about the ratio of increased performance to increased power consumption.Sure, but what's the point of having extra cores if you don't use them?
My point is not that you cannot keep 4 cores somewhat busy. My point is that you can rarely get a linear speedup from parallelization, so 4 cores will in general not at all be 4 times as fast as 1 core or twice as fast as 2 cores.
You're right, as usualYour original statement was still misleading. You said it'll use more power but you only get more performance in some cases. Strongly implying that you always use more power. You didn't say anything about the ratio of increased performance to increased power consumption.Sure, but what's the point of having extra cores if you don't use them?
My point is not that you cannot keep 4 cores somewhat busy. My point is that you can rarely get a linear speedup from parallelization, so 4 cores will in general not at all be 4 times as fast as 1 core or twice as fast as 2 cores.
You rarely get a linear speedup from parallelization, but that doesn't mean that the sub-ideal scaling is all lost in redundant work. If a core is waiting for another core to finish something it can be clock gated or possibly even power gated. In some systems its voltage can be dropped independently. The point is, it's more complex than saying distributing a task to N cores will use N times the power no matter what the performance scaling is.
On the flip side, distributing a task to more cores can use less power if the clock speed is lower. If you cut the clock speed in half you will generally use a lot less than half the power, at least if you were anywhere near the higher end of the clock range. This can work asynchronously to an extent. If you have one task that needs 1GHz and another that needs 0.7GHz it can be better to execute them on two cores at 1GHz, clock gating one of them some of the time, than one at 1.7GHz. This is especially true if the SoC needs especially heroic voltage scaling to hit their higher clock levels, as many SoCs these days have (Cortex-A15 was never really intended to go past 1.5GHz in phones)