[Nexus 4 Original Android Development] albundy2010:
No we don't need charts

These are passively cooled systems in a closed thermally confined space. Whether it's a dual core or quad core is not important at all for what I believe was your point. Under a load high enough to hit said thermal limit they will both hit it. The quad will usually get there first depending on the work load but the dual will get there as well. They are capped by thermals.

So whether you have 2 or 4 won't matter to the surface temperature / temp you feel on your hand. Which is what you based it on. The temp will feel the same because the limit to the cooling of the chip doesn't change. Just how fast it gets there.

A @15 quad core in the nexus 4 ( a horrific idea) would still feel the same to your hand under the same thermal control set up. It will warm up very very fast and throttle. A dual core krait would take longer to reach that state but it's the same result. Device hits said temperature ( whether it's the SoC or the back glass/surface area) and it feels the same to you.

With these modern chips the dynamic range has expanded for most part. Lower on the lower end but higher on the higher end. This is not always the case. The krait 200 was actually better at the lower end compared to the krait 300 but the opposite way on the high end. Anyways the end result is they all throttle. Each oem can pick what temp they want to throttle at too! It could be done to keep the surface temperature at a certain point or for battery life or both

Again back to the a15 dual core nexus 10 ( I almost tried to use car analogy but I usually can't stand them and they don't work very well) to explain. That device / SoC has been shown to be able to draw 8 watts. But it's TDP is 4 watts. Anandtech tested that. In normal use it is not allowed to draw more power even though if you toss the right workload it can double that and will before it realizes it and says oh no you don't.

We could also look the two gs4 versions. The octa fail version is capable of drawing much more power than the snapdragon version. But in normal use it doesn't do the TDP. Even a on a stock one you can circumvent this though. Since those idiots at Samsung decided to cheat on benchmarks if you run one on their list they hotplugg all @15s in at max clocks and essentially turn off thermal control. That device with get scary hot doing it. Brain Klug did it to see if he could get the phone to melt / catch on fire. It didn't but it gets extremely hot. The snapdragon version did not mess with the thermal. It would throttle like normal. But if you took both devices and ran the same workload without the cheating going on, the will feel the same in hand. Maybe one gets warmer faster but the TDP is the same. Another point of reference is the tegra 4 powered shield. They put a fan it to raise the TDP of the device.

These are not desktop chips where the TDP used to mean hey this is max the chip is going to draw, design your cooling solution to deal with 95w. Run prime 95 / Orthos and do some video transcoding with handbrake and it wouldn't draw more than 95w. Mobile doesn't work that way and neither does the desktop anymore either. It's dictated by thermals. At least in the desktop space they still advertise the nominal frequency on them and everything above it is a turbo bin. On mobile it's the opposite. The turbo speed is the advertised speed and the base clocks ( if they had to disclose a TDP like the older days with desktop chips) are ignored.

They run boosted and then throttle down when they hit their thermal wall. Desktop chips it is expected that you could take 65w part at 3ghz and toss on the stock cooler and run it at those speeds under a torture test for a month with a throttle. The older chips before turbo that was it. Now with turbo they will boost up to those speed bins as long as thermals allow it.

I'll go back to the nexus one too. That device would get so hot I would throttle it myself. The device didn't have anything throttling at all! It was like a desktop. You could run it to get so hot the hw itself would hit the shutdown limit. Which is what any decent modern computer will do if you something stupid like not install the cooler or do it wrong etc.

More on throttling and heat. Devices like the amoled galaxy line is known to throttle not only the SoC but the display. It dims. The iPhones over the years had / had their throttling joys too. I believe theirs was the camera couldn't be used and maybe the screen too.

And yes this is the place for this discussion. This thread is about many things. The kernel of course! But it's about memes, simms flower pictures, bundy rants, football and soccer and of course actually trying to help anybody that has a legit question no matter what the local trinity knuckleheads are blabbing about. For a long time it was the official home of the rascarlo roms too!

To close this up I am not arguing against undervolting or that adding more cores doesn't increase the dynamic range ( meaning it's capable of drawing more power). But that the end result in throttling and how hot it feels in your hand when doing so is the same. It's a not a free for all go as hot as you want / draw as much power as you want. It's use what you got until you're limited by thermals. But if you want to be a haxor and turn all throttling off except the hw failsafe which you can't. That's a different story. Peak power draw and how it feels ( dangerously hot) matter. Like my Damn nexus one using gps in the car while charging with the screen on.