yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Galaxy S 4 General] AndreiLux:
It is an 8 core CPU and all 8 cores are able to run simultaneously, it doesn't matter how the initial software is limited because the hardware is not, as much as people like pissing on the Octa name you don't go calling it a dual quad just because the software that's being shipped in in this implementation can't use it.

A15 optimised code on Snapdragon? Sorry what? The Krait cores are nowhere even near an A15, so all those A15 compiler flags and optimizations aren't even able to be fully used on the Snapdragon versions. And on big.LITTLE, you target the compiler for the A15 cores since the A7 cores are completely ISA compatible, just severely shaved down.

A little less misinformation from a respected developer here please...
[Galaxy S 4 General] Shammyh:
It was my impression that the Snapdragon (or Krait really) architecture is actually derived from the ARM A15 reference? Except with whatever customizations Qualcomm has added/changed. Is that incorrect? And at any rate, even if Krait-300 isn't on par with the A15 reference, it's still gotta be pretty close. Granted, the Krait-400 is the real competitor to the A15, but so far, from what I've seen the A15 can't be more than 10-15% more efficient per clock over the current Krait.

And yea, the A15's pipeline depth is greater, but from a number of other perspectives they seem similar. And again, the Krait-300 has gotta be a fair bit better than the Krait-200.

Finally, as far as running all 8-cores simultaneously... Have you played with an Exynos version to say for sure? Can it stay within it's thermal envelop even with all 8 cores running at their full speed? Has anyone actually seen the kernel drivers Samsung is going to employ? And further, what about that "cache coherent interconnect"? Does it really have the bandwidth/speed to handle all 8 cores running at full tilt? And more interestingly, given that I've yet to see a picture of the actual die (guess will wait for Chipworks), how certain are you that they each given core in this first hardware implementation can actually be gated completely independently of it's companion core (one A7 to one A15)?

And as Codeworkx did accurately point out, there will almost certainly be less development support for the Exynos version over the Snapdragon version, regardless of which is actually more interesting from a raw hardware perspective. Personally, I think the idea of big.LITTLE is very cool, and shows great promise, though it remains to be seen exactly how that turns out in practice with this first Samsung implementation.

Just curious if you'd elaborate on some of these points. Thanks.
[Galaxy S 4 General] hung2900:
I agree it's not octa for I9500, but the name Samsung Octa of the SoC is nothing wrong.

S4 cannot use all 8 cores doesn't mean the SoC is not Octa. You have a house with 8 rooms but you wanna open 4 rooms only while others want 8 rooms, the house is still a 8-room house.
[Galaxy S 4 General] AndreiLux:
Krait is not based on A15; period. People have been claiming this ever since the S4 (Krait v1) last year.

Since now we actually have an A15 to compare them to, the performance difference is night and day. If the Octa is already 12% faster than the S600, with an 18% clock disadvantage, then it puts the IPC discrepancy at 25% between the Krait 300 and the A15. And please remember that we're talking about the Krait 300 here, which had huge performance improvements over the previous iterations like the Snapdragon S4's, so imagine how blown away those would be in a direct comparison.

It's not about pipeline depth only, the A15 simply has more execution units, bigger and fatter branch prediction, and is simply more aggressive in most regards. Ironically, Krait 300's biggest upgrade was the TLB and other lookup table upgrades that the A9r4 also supposedly got retroactively upgraded from the A15 design.

To claim or talk about Snapdragons using A15 optimized code-paths and compiler optimizations is inherently misinformed or jaded by Qualcomm marketing.

There is an actual picture of the die, check my other thread on the topic. I already mention it there that the companion core is just a logical pair-up that has no direct physical representation. I don't really understand what you want to say about gating them independently, of course you can, as that's a basic requirement to even run them efficiently in core migration mode. Samsung already confirmed that the chip is able to run all possible running modes back in January; not that they needed to, ARM documented this quite some time ago.

I wouldn't worry about the CCI, that's something designed to scale up much wider than "merely" 4 A15's and 4 A7's. You're hitting main memory bottlenecks much earlier than that even without running all cores.

Power consumption is something I don't know about, but adding the A7's on top of the A15's running at full power is like pissing in the ocean and trying to measure the increased volume, it's going to be very minor in terms of power.

Most quads nowadays enable all of their cores once in a full moon, it's irrelevant in terms of realistic power management. big.LITTLE and especially a many-core implementation like the Octa targets a very different aspect of the multi-core CPU paradigm.
[Galaxy S 4 General] resore:
some guys behave like octa is samsung stupid marketing thingie but its not. its the first implementation of a15 plus big. LITTLE architecture

you can do the samsung hatin but octa dsnt come from samsung
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
I am wondering if the difference in memory bandwidth between Qualcomm and Exynos will have any visible effect at this resolution. AFAIK, it's 12.8GB/s vs 8.5GB/s.
[Galaxy S 4 General] 1337RYoN:
AndreiLux can you tell me if the S600 is very much inferior to the exynos? I'm going to be stuck with the I9505 and if there is a noticeable, massive difference in processing speed I'm gonna look for ways to get the i9500
[Galaxy S 4 General] eXelero:
mainly for the same reasons, but also due to the fact that in .ro only the SD600 option will be available officially (and as a first shipment) + Orange included into the same 100 EUR cheaper package a 9000mAh Samsung juicer, will go for the 9505 version :)
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
That was posted weeks ago and nothing had changed or swayed me to the Octa. I think the money saved and the Lte here will be worth it.
[Galaxy S 4 General] -]Megacharge[-:
They're both 12.8 GB/s IIRC, as they are both using the LPDDR3. I think you're thinking of the S4 vs HTC One, the One uses LPDDR2 which is around 8.5 GB/s.
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2013/01/07/snapdragon-800-series-and-600-processors-unveiled

I don't know for sure. This press statement doesn't say so for 600.

It says 12.8GB/s

only

for 800.

Different LPDDR3 frequencies in 600 and 800?
[Galaxy S 4 General] -]Megacharge[-:
The S600 Does support DDR3 as well, this was discussed in the HTC One forums a while back. The S4 is using LPDDR3 on it's S600 and Exynos. It's S600 performs a bit better than the HTC One's due to the increased memory bandwidth.
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
Yes, no arguments here. Point is what is the frequency of LPDDR3 in the S4? I am sure bandwidth is dependent on the frequency of the DDR3.
[Galaxy S 4 General] -]Megacharge[-:
800Mhz is the frequency, 12.8GB/s bandwidth.
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
That's what I want to hear. Source of that info? Anything tear-down that I missed?

BTW, hope everyone from Boston is alright. Pretty nasty incident.
[Galaxy S 4 General] yahyoh:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/Exynos/products5octa.html
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
Yes, I am aware of that.

I am referring to Qualcomm 600.

Press release: http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2013/01/07/snapdragon-800-series-and-600-processors-unveiled

It mentions 12.8 GB/s for the 800, says nothing about the 600.

I know that 600 supports LPDDR3. I am just wondering if anyone confirmed if it's running at 800Mhz.

What intrigues me is that why they mentioned 12.8GB/s

only

for 800?

Did anyone get any useful inputs from tear-downs?
[Galaxy S 4 General] joelteixeira:
I initially wanted to but an HTC One mainly because of front speakers (everytime I show something on my phone I need to put my hand behind to get a better volume) but I'm going with GS4 and both versions will be available.

Now, I'm a little bit worried with PowerVR GPU and I would like to hear some opinions. The CPU is better but while gaming do I have reasons to be concerned?

Tapatalked from my GNex
[Galaxy S 4 General] yahyoh:
i'm not sure , but probably both using Samsung LPDDR3 RAM but maybe Krait 300 doesn't support 800MHz clock :confused::confused:

---------- Post added at 12:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:44 AM ----------

this thread not for comparing ONE vs GS4

but ONE isn't louder than GS4 BTW ( but it should sound nicer because of stereo speakers )
[Galaxy S 4 General] joelteixeira:
I guess you misunderstood me, I'm asking opinions about what GS4 to buy (Adreno or Exynos) regarding GPU performance. Maybe you should read my post one more time.

Tapatalked from my GNex
[Galaxy S 4 General] yahyoh:
:D:o

i think its better to wait for final versions of both then we can compare :rolleyes:
[Galaxy S 4 General] Ace42:
I would skip all A15 devices only because A57 will have 2-3 tines the performance from what I've read, and tegra 5 can play battlefield 3, so everything in this year is a filler similarly to those dumb TV episodes.
[Galaxy S 4 General] i9100g user:
And I will skip tegra 5 because tegra 6 would play Call of duty 10 :cool: at ultra settings .

sent fromXperia sT21i

Everything stock
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
I won't expect that much from a single generation. I think some of the improvements are as a result of better process/manufacturing tech.

The Cortex-A57 is a big core similar to Cortex-A15, bringing 20% more performance per clock cycle, higher frequency capability, at slightly higher efficiency than the Cortex-A15. The Cortex-A53 is a LITTLE core similar to the Cortex-A7, with 25% more performance per clock cycle, at the same power efficiency as Cortex-A7.
[Galaxy S 4 General] tungzta:
One very important factor you forgot to mention is compatibility. The SD600 version is optimized for the US 4G market where as the Exynos version is optimized for Asia and varying parts of Europe. What's the point in buying such a spectacular phone if you're going to be hindered by something so menial as compatibility. Also, qualcomm chips generally have a more robust development community. However, being Samsung, probably won't matter, as most Samsung Devs have said they will NOT be purchasing the S4 because Samsung is a group of jerks.
[Galaxy S 4 General] CLARiiON:
What has Asia got to do with Exynos? That's a weird logic.
[Galaxy S 4 General] tungzta:
SD 600 is a quadcore chip by qualcomm. The Exynos is the octacore chip made by some company out of Asia (if not by Samsung) if I'm not mistaken.
[Galaxy S 4 General] muhamet:
That is problem is Asia chip and wee will nhot buy Exynos.We will buy Samsung Snapdragon but Samsung is Asia :eek: f...k wee will buy Snapdragon only
[Galaxy S 4 General] SaneQ:
Im so stupid and cant find the answer anywhere and it bugs me because it is the last problem with me to get the One. The problem is that which phone has better speakers? Like if you listen to a song, which phone will sound better?
[Galaxy S 4 General] GTRagnarok:
The HTC One will have better sounding speakers.
[Galaxy S 4 General] Idontknoww:
so which one is best one ?
[Galaxy S 4 General] slapdaddy:
The HTC One will have better-sounding external speakers, that is, without headphones. Though I question just how good two small speakers can sound and the whole "stereo" feature seems a bit gimmicky. Two small speakers placed that close together will have to have some kind of "affect" applied to the output to generate any meaningful stereo effect.

Headphones are a different story completely, and depending on which variant of S4 you buy, it will either sound very similar to the One (S600 variant of S4) or a *lot* better (Exynos variant of S4).

Sent from my HTC Vivid.
[Galaxy S 4 General] msavic6:
The advertised "stereo" effect is basically a gimmick, there is hardly a benefit in stereo if the two speakers are 3 inches apart. There probably is a small noticeable difference but that is probably software enhanced like you said.
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
This depends on your application. At least for my Playstation Vita, when I'm playing games stereo lets me know what's happening on the right and left side of the screen.

THere's a group of people working in to get gamecube games to work on the S600 too.

It really depends on your application. Same thing with all the SGS4 software features. Gimmick to some, not to others.
[Galaxy S 4 General] Dannyada1988:
Although there are some difference between these two models, but I think there won't be much difference in performance.
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
There will be a huge difference if you have LTE in your area. I'll say that. LTE was overrated when it wasn't really anywhere. But now it's in a good portion of large cities, at least in America.
[Galaxy S 4 General] Al Gore:
how's lte related to performance?
[Galaxy S 4 General] pack21:
Well, if most apps use network services u will have a faster overall performance.
[Galaxy S 4 General] 1337RYoN:
What? That doesn't make sense
[Galaxy S 4 General] Guitarfreak26:
Is there anywhere to order the octa version yet?
[Galaxy S 4 General] mg2195:
What doesn't make sense? LTE is much faster then hspa+ and below...if an app requires network services (internet) than the app will run faster on an LTE device since it can get its data faster...
[Galaxy S 4 General] Mithrandir007:
In Belgium for instance, if you have a 4G phone, you don't need a different subscription to use 4G, it's the same price as 3G (with Proximus at least).

It's still being deployed though, not many parts of the country have access to it yet.
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
Everything you do connects to the Internet. I have a i9300 and my GF the SGH-i747.

She tends to load games, which almost all require Internet connection, Facebook, etc much faster than I.

Everything else we load things about the same, even though mine beats her in benchmarks much more than these two SoC were are currently discussing.

I've just come to realize a few millisecond difference in performance isn't worth sacrificing Lte. Mind you where we live I pull about 3 mbps average where she will pull 10 to 20ish mbps.
[Galaxy S 4 General] pack21:
Thanks for sparing me the explanation.

For those who dont understand put your phone in G instead of 3G and see the difference in overall performance. Same for 3G/4G.

High benchs will not save poor usage experience with lower net connectivity.
[Galaxy S 4 General] Mittaa:
Same in Denmark.

Widely implemented in some places and fully during the 2014-2015.

I don't think we will be charged for 4G.
[Galaxy S 4 General] codeworkx:
Speed isn't what matters.

HSPA+

Downlink: 28 Mbit/s = 3,5 Mb/s (DC-HSPA is at 42.2)

Uplink: 11 Mbit/s = 1,375 Mb/s

(Rel-11 Octa-Cell can go up to 336 Mbp/s)

LTE

Downlink: 100 Mbit/s = 12,5 Mb/s

Uplink: 50Mbit/s = 6,25 MB/s

(Will also go higher by time)

Now tell me which app really needs to have 3,5 Megabytes per second or even 12,5 Mb/s?

The Illegally-download-new-cinema-movies-App. Nothing else.

What probably matters is the lower latency of LTE and that has to be proven first.

I've also seen HSPA+ at ~ 50ms.
[Galaxy S 4 General] sachinaik:
Notice that none of the standard sites like gsmarena, androidpolice reviewed GT9500!!

I smell something fishy...
[Galaxy S 4 General] raclimja:
oh boy

cortex a15 cores sucks power and big.little is only good if you are doing light tasks, however once you do some intensive task such as web browsing, sw rendered video (hi10p), etc... the battery life would absolutely tank

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...-which-mobile-cpu-is-the-most-power-efficient

cortex a15 cores is extremely power hungry and facts point that out.

if you search for Nexus 10 which uses an Exynos Quad that has Cortex a15 cores at 32nm HKMG, the power consumption under peak is double compared to krait/ apple swift cores.

I know Exynos 5 Octa is manufactured at 28nm HKMG and is supposedly have more power efficient GPU (PowerVR 544MP3), however even with that die shrink it is still impossible to halve the power consumption of Cortex a15 @ 32nm HKMG meaning Exynos 5 Octa is a power hog.

reference

-http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144778-atom-vs-cortex-a15-vs-krait-vs-tegra-3-which-mobile-cpu-is-the-most-power-efficient
[Galaxy S 4 General] i9100g user:
A15s would be rarely used, A7s would run most of the time. Apple is already planning to use A7 quad core in iphone 5S , also there was a demonstration on a big.LITTLE

Soc, where they ran epic citadel benchmark and for 90% of time A7s were active, and during browsing A15s were used for loading some heavy pages.

I think ,most people know that A15 cores will drain your battery pretty fast,but the point is you would rarely need them (benchmarking would be a different case)

And once you get a custom kernel supporting the other usage model of big.LITTLE i.e HMP (Heterogeneous MultiProcessing) , you could turn them(A15 cluster) completely off, or use A7 and A15 in any order which you find best for power saving(or whatever your need is.)

I guess once we reach 20/22nm (which should be next year) we will experience actual performance of A15 cores.
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
can you then tell me why my GF's SGH is faster when our apps show that they are collecting data online?

In addition, the majority of things we do on our phones is on the internet and she loads websites 3 to 5 seconds faster than I do with my i9300.

Overall user experience, is it worth sacrificing LTE so that your phone can load an application a few milliseconds faster?

Also, I thought LTE connects, receives and sends faster than HSPA+ as well. I could be wrong about this, but that would explain why side by side my user experience when it comes to internet connectivity in public varies between my i9300 and my GF's SGH-i747. This must be due to the latency you speak of right?
[Galaxy S 4 General] Shammyh:
Couple of things... LTE is completely IP switched, HSPA+ (which is really a derivative of UMTS/W-CDMA) is not.

Latency is a lot better with LTE based on design, as you mention, but in addition the actual "spin up" time with LTE is a lot lower than with any UMTS based technology. Hence, even for things like "web browsing", where total bandwidth isn't saturated for either HSPA or LTE, things will appear quicker on an LTE device.

In addition, the numbers you quote are "ideal-scenario". Obviously, almost no wireless interface will be running in an ideal scenario. Hence, let's say you get maybe 50% of your peak speed 90% of the time. Well, then you're comparing maybe ~8-10 mbit down, and 4-5 mbit up with HSPA+ to ~45/50 mbit down and 20 mbit up with LTE. And in that scenario, yea, app downloads/updates, streaming video, and latency sensitive apps will certainly perform quite a bit better with LTE. Also, in America, some carriers like AT&T didn't fully upgrade their HSPA networks in lieu of LTE being rolled out nation-wide. Hence, our HSPA+ (or effectively HSPA) speeds here are not even as good as you quote, and moving to LTE makes an even bigger difference. There's also tethering, which I use extensively, where that peak bandwidth does actually come into play.

There's also the fact that LTE is still fairly new in the U.S. are the HSPA+ bands/interfaces are a lot more crowded than the LTE bands/interfaces (even if the backhaul is the same). Sure, that'll change with time (and it already is changing pretty fast) but for now, there's still some pretty practical advantages to LTE over HSPA (+ or not).
[Galaxy S 4 General] AndreiLux:
Afaik there is no such thing as a thread entity to be represented in terms of data in the caches, that's deep MMU and SCU workings that even I can't reliably answer you.

I know that from their white-paper claims, that in core migration mode, they do move most of the caches in their entirety in 20000 cycles, which is basically nothing.

The rest is handled on a higher level in software and in the kernel, I suggest hitting up the resources page of Linaro and reading the big.LITTLE related presentations.

I don't think we'll see official support for HMP from Samsung for the S4 simply because it's already past it's development period and for them to implement something that big as an update is unlikely. That said there will be people, mostly myself, who'll try to get it running. (If the device will be available for a reasonable price)

No, asynchronous core clocks is a Qualcomm unique characteristic, ARM designs are synchronous. A Samsung whitepaper (the big.LITTLE one) also stated that it's a doubtful feature as it adds a whole lot of latency between the differently clocked function blocks.

I posted some links on another forum on the matter: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1707036&postcount=344
[Galaxy S 4 General] Shammyh:
Much obliged. Yea, 20k cycles is indeed next to nothing, so that's good to hear. Especially with ARM's more recent designs pushing ~10 billion cycles per second (though my math may be off there). And gotcha about the MMU, though I had to look up what a Snoop Control Unit was, as it appears to be ARM-specific terminology. Again, not very familiar with ARM designs.

I'll check out the Linaro docs (and the ones from the other forum post) when I have some time... Looks informative. I guess it'll be interesting to see then how the currently shipping software handles everything. It definitely does seem that the hardware has outpaced the software at least for now. In particular looks like the kernel won't be as good at power management as perhaps it one day can be.

Thanks for taking the time to respond!
[Galaxy S 4 General] sem1845:
I can't wait for this to come out. It's going to be a nice upgrade from my Nexus. I'm glad I've held out updgrading for so long.
[Galaxy S 4 General] mw86:
As a US resident I have been wondering the same thing. I have no idea where to purchase gt-i9500 when it is time as this thread and a few others have me sure I am going to purchase the exynos variant without a doubt.
[Galaxy S 4 General] mithun46:
Actually . The i9500 will be better than i9505 at all means and is better . Except for LTE

Speed : i9500 - 8 Core

Dev Support : i9500 will be still faster with less source codes than i9505 becuase even though SD releases the source code - it is a 4 core one while the other is a 8 core

and With the new governer tacken by cyanogenmod from samsung [PegasusQ : utilizes all cores better for exynos] it will be only faster

And with overclock for i9500 : nothing will stand against this beast

There will be official Cyanogenmod for i9500 by the lord cyanogen himself as his G+ post suggests and official AOKP by me maybe
[Galaxy S 4 General] -]Megacharge[-:
Yup, it's going to be perfect for me. As I'm a huge fan of running benchmarks all day everyday, it's all I use my phones for.
[Galaxy S 4 General] Brendo:
HAHA :D
[Galaxy S 4 General] gleahr:
What are the chances that the Exynos version would be able to support LTE with a custom ROM? Like what the Nexus 4 was able to do?
[Galaxy S 4 General] SlimJ87D:
Well you're not missing out on much. Honestly my GFs sgh felt better than my i9300 because she had more ram and with lte the latency was better.

But if you don't have lte in your area that's understandable. A year ago there was hardly lte spots where I live now it's almost everywhere.
[Galaxy S 4 General] codeworkx:
^^

You see what Samsung is doing?

Calling it "Octa" is currently just fooling users. Nothing else. ;)

IT'S OCTA! OH, IT'S RUNNING WITH 8 UB0R 1337 CORES! IT'S FASTAS****!!!

Eh... NO. It's a public beta test with you as the tester.