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RamenSandwich

Powerwall hits mobile harder because no one wants a bulky fan in their phone. Explains why phones tend to have multiple cores, but lower clock speeds than PCs and laptops.

bjay

It seems likely that the fact that mobile processors tend to utilize multiple cores will drive a shift in compiler technology if it hasn't already. Another option to explore in the field of mobile, power-sensitive computing is intermittent computing. Check out CMU Prof. Brandon Lucia's work in that area!

amf

I remember when the first quad-core processors came out for phones, it was a huge buzzword. But, based on the graphs we've seen about the diminishing returns of parallelization, it doesn't seem feasible for phones to keep increasing core count.

sampathchanda

We could see the NVIDIA Tegra X1 example to see how we shifted from multi-core processor (with all cores of same type) to a mobile processor having two types of CPU cores, GPU core, image processor core. Probably in the near future, mobile processor will also include a deep learning processor.

M12

@bjay Do you have a cool article on how compiler technology might be shifted due to the multicore mobile processors? I'm not finding a direct correlation between the two, but I'm interested in what you just said.

sandeep6189

As the world continues to extract more parallelism, we can see that there is an increasing trend of separating core computation tasks like image processing/location etc. This would be more relatable in smartphones which have separate processors for different features.

atadkase

Other than the mentioned cores, a mobile processor also has a DSP which is usually used to process voice. Even this DSP can be a multi-core processor with its own ISA (See Qualcomm Hexagon). A smartphone today is very beefy in terms of computing resources, but it must also hit the power wall.