8 core update for exynos? !

rushless said:

I have had my Note 2014 (32GB) for two days and would not want to have both core sets running at the same time. The device can already get very warm in the SOC area and the battery drains just like my iPad 4 when playing 3D games- faster than I want it to. Games are smooth and ditto for apps, so not seeing an advantage of all eight, but see the two key disadvantages. Not running into any core hand-off issues some are reporting that can cause lag. Not yet anyway.


Added:

I use Nova for my launcher, since IMO much better than Samsung's. Based on performance, I see no reason for me to root the 2014. Very happy already, so see no need to rock the boat.

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It is completely false to say that HMP would impact battery, if anything the opposite is true. There are very few applications which could even in principle use all 8 cores. Instead most of the times 3 is where apps max out, which would make little sense to enable HMP for performance reasons. But it makes all the sense in the world to enable it for battery reasons.

Samsung released a video a couple of months ago showing just that. Having all 8 cores enabled at the same time means that you have the 4 little one take most of the workload and the 4 big ones only be enabled as needed. This would result in unbelievable battery savings. Imagine an occasion where 4 little cores are not enough, what does the current implementation of big.little does? Oh but enable the 4 big cores disabling the little ones, so it ends up at times to light all 4 big cores when 4 little ones + 1 big one would be enough, this results in far lower battery.

HMP is a great idea both in paper and in practice, see the new Note Neo, it's using HMP to perfection and manages with "lower" hardware to perform as well as it's elder brother as well as be more energy efficient. *This* should be our example. Exynos 5420 is HMP compatible and it would only take a dev to enable it. I don't think that it will happen, but *if* it will it would instantly lead to far better devices...

Note 2014 has rather mediocre battery, my gf's ipad mini with almost half the MAHs has more juice. That's partly because the exynos chip is not very energy efficient. Enable all 8 cores and it will become that...

BTW the Note Neo sources (with HMP enabled) were just released. If we had a more active community I would expect an HMP patch coming from the community soon. Sadly seeing how badly misinformed most people are about HMP I don't think anyone would put the effort required and we'd stay with gimped devices ... oh well.

mentaluproar said:

So we really can expect HMP on this tablet? Excellent! I wonder how apps like BOINC would fare with the power. Could the tablet handle it?

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Of course it can handle it. The rest is really just up to samsung whether they decide to roll out Linux 3.10+ for our device. Alternatively someone could simply backport the patchset from Linaro to Linux 3.4 or compile an actual 3.10+ kernel that boots on the SM-P600.

On a similar note, I recently tested Linux 3.14 with the normal IKS configuration (based on Samsung's defconfig for the SM-P600 with some updated values from the config for the Arndale Octa - an Exynos5420 dev board) but while it compiles just fine it doesn't get past the stock Samsung bootloader, and I'm sure there are some drivers missing as well. The only stuff I have currently merged in are the proprietary ARM Mali gpu drivers.

If I remember correctly dorimanx managed to get the 3.14 kernel to work with AOSP on the SGS2 but I'm not quite sure how he went about it and I'm too much of a kernel newbie to figure it out myself. If anyone here has any suggestions it would be deeply appreciated. Source: http://github.com/sigma-1/linux-linaro-3.14

Here's your HMP. You just need to buy a device with Exynos 5422 (we have 5420) to get it.

Samsung announced two new mobile SoCs at MWC today. The first is an update to the Exynos 5 Octa with the new Exynos 5422. The 5422 is a mild update to the 5420, which was found in some international variants of the Galaxy Note 3. The new SoC is still built on a 28nm process at Samsung, but enjoys much higher frequencies on both the Cortex A7 and A15 clusters. The two clusters can run their cores at up to 1.5GHz and 2.1GHz, respectively.

The 5422 supports HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing), and Samsung LSI tells us that unlike the 5420 we may actually see this one used with HMP enabled. HMP refers to the ability for the OS to use and schedule threads on all 8 cores at the same time, putting those threads with low performance requirements on the little cores and high performance threads on the big cores.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7811/samsungs-exynos-5422-the-ideal-biglittle-exynos-5-hexa-5260​

aac and ac3 seem to cause the most problems SD and HD. I generally keep the nitrate around 2.5 Mb/s just for portability sake. container doesn't matter as avi, mkv, and mp4 all have the drops. I've used mx, BS, Archos, xbmc, and a few others and installed custom codecs if needed. heck even Netflix has a few frame drops. maybe I'm just too sensitive to it, but my s4, gn2, and gn8 have no problems. my old gn10.1 had no problems either. this 10.1 2014 is also the first Samsung device I've had that doesn't natively support ac3. hardware playback with alternative players do play the ac3 audio, but with dropped frames.

My undergrad is computer electronics (though over ten years ago). Tech has changed a lot, but laws of electrical physics have stayed constant. Saying it is completely false seems as scientifically dubious as saying it is completely true. Samsung was concerned about thermals with the current devices. Seems that ties with likely more sustained peak watt consumption, so warmer running and more potential for battery consumption.

With the current SOC being a 28 nM build, how does higher performance not equal more heat and less battery? Respectfully does not add up. Added: Unless the nM goes down in correlation to increased speed which can not be the case. That is unless the core mix results in an exponential speed curve, which would also be very unlikely.

Again, the premise of point here is in regard to faster performance and not power efficency.

Added 2 : BarryH does a fine job of articulating. The benefit would be efficiency and not a speed boost that would not come with a thermal and battery life cost, since the fixed constant is the 28nM.