64-bit Big.Little applied to Android devices, not as beautiful as expected

Apple ’s iPhone 5S has been criticized by many people without too many highlights. For many hardware researchers, especially processors, 64-bit is enough to make a good study, and 64-bit or 32-bit, for consumers It is true that innovation is not so obvious, but for the entire industry chain, it is meaningful.

Many people still do not know or feel the actual benefits of the 64-bit Windows and Intel painstakingly launched on the Win7 platform. At least now many people still think that XP runs faster than Win7. Unfortunately, such feelings may also appear on smartphones in the short term. Except for the local luxury gold selling point of the 64-bit iPhone 5S, you will not feel how much it has improved compared to 5C or even 5.

Although theoretically, the calculation speed should be 64-bit faster than 32-bit by more than 30%, and from the perspective of power consumption, the increase is not too obvious, which further improves the smartphone experience. Speaking of 64-bit, although Intel has been doing 64-bit on PC for many years, the first 64-bit on the mobile phone is still the top of the ARM. In fact, the first 64 of the PC is not Intel, let alone the server and PowerPC. Too.

In the face of Intel ’s thunder and little offensive, it seems that ARM ’s opponent is itself. After all, regardless of the ups and downs in the mobile phone processor market, as long as Intel does not actually pose a threat, it is just a knot between customers and customers. It's all ARM. Therefore, what ARM has to do is to improve the performance and power consumption ratio of its core, so that Intel always feels that it is always worse, until it is discouraged. Another aspect is that the faster the development of multi-core, the better. , Their own profits are a little more.

For these two strategic reasons, big.Little came into being. Of course, the above words are my own guess. ARM ’s own people will not be so frank. Another small news I heard is that the emergence of big.Little is also due to the emergency correction of the power consumption of the A15. And, the power consumption of high-performance cores in the future may not be suitable to be taken out separately as a 4-core processor.

Having said that, is big.Little good? it is good! I think it ’s good, but the premise is not to increase the cost too much. Take the quad-core A7 + A15 as an example. If the quad-core A15 can bake eggs, then adding four A7 cores may reduce power consumption a lot, but the price seems to be Soaring a lot, although consumers can't feel the price of the whole machine, but after investigation, whether the added four A7s are really worth paying so much money, it is a mess. Of course, for ARM, rice comes from the end consumer, and for customers, they can solve their low power consumption needs, and there are gimmicks to drive sales. They are also willing to pay 4 more A7 licenses.

ARM recently announced their future development strategy for big.Little in Beijing. In the market below $ 150, A7 and Mali 400 or 450 are used to meet. In the future, 64-bit A53 will cooperate with Mali T622. In the market of 200-300 US dollars, A12 and Mali T622 are now used to deal with, in the future it will be big.Little's A12 + A7 with T624.

In the high-end market above $ 400, the main focus is now on big.Little's A15 + A7, with Mali T628, the future is 64-bit A57 + A53 big.Little, with the next-generation Mali GPU, this can also be regarded as the trendiest mobile AP future Configuration. Of course, for the current big.Little, it has been necessary to open and close a pair of large and small cores from the early days, and slowly realize it by the Global Task Scheduling technology.

Some explanations from ARM also include, big.Little or 64-bit. It will only start to be gradually put into mass production by customers in 2014. The process recommended by ARM is 20nm (I personally am curious about the 20nm yield in 2014 There are several Fabs that can be qualified to do). For ARM, it is too early for 64-bit to face too many 32-to-64 system problems, which is an unreasonable burden on AP performance.

Of course, ARM also admits that they have no plans to develop 64- and 32-bit mixed large and small core products, because the software system is too complicated to configure. For applications such as AP, resources need to be optimized, and there is not much left to be left. 32 and 64 cooperation and other needs. So since it is not possible to switch as the PC is in the translation process, the problem with the software is coming!

From the road map, ARM hopes to fully transition to 64-bit processor cores from 2014 to 2015, which undoubtedly poses a high challenge to the entire operating system and applications, running 64-bit hardware with 32-bit software It ’s not impossible, but it ’s suspected of being overkill, and it also involves some internal conversion software calls. There is no doubt that there will be a certain performance loss. This urges Android to quickly upgrade to 64-bit and provide 64-bit for all application developers. Meta development environment, and as soon as possible to improve the migration of 32-bit existing programs to 64-bit.

Apple is the first to move to 64-bit, partly because iOS has adapted to 64-bit early in the PC era, and Apple has strong control over software. For Window Mobile system, 64-bit is not a problem, but the largest share of Android, you need to solve these problems as quickly as possible to meet the urgent needs of the market. For Android, can 32 to 64 solve the migration smoothly and quickly The problem will be the biggest threat to Android market development in just five years.

An issue that has been talked about before is that the Android system is forced to upgrade the hardware frequently to a certain extent due to the homogenized system and constant version updates to bring a faster and faster user experience. When not worried about running points, various Android mobile phone processor providers and even ARM have to compare various running points. Many people criticize that Android is not an era of rational smartphones, but an era of crazy heap hardware that is even more outrageous than PCs, from single-core to 4-core singing mainstream, but a year More time is a bit incredible in itself. Is it really that the hardware lags too far before, or is the homogenous platform that the whole machine manufacturer can only rely on the hardware to kill the opponent?

Now it's okay, from 32 to 64, it's still big.Little's 8-core architecture, the hardware is already strong enough, the Android should think about how to increase research and development efforts, to adapt to the hardware leap early, big.Little brings The problem is that the number of cores is doubled at once, while the processing performance is improved, the average power consumption can be reduced, but there is a more interesting topic. If there is no big.Little, when the 4-core A57 is used alone on a smartphone , Is it really possible to grill steaks portable?

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