Ah, here's the thing:I never said that M cores are crappy, or there is anything wrong with them. The thing is I doubt you need 6 of them in the mobile SoC other than to boost benchmark scores. If all the background tasks can be handled by a cluster of 4 A520 cores, then 4 M cores will definitely be able to handle them sufficiently.
And what is the sustained MT throughput you need in mobile phone other than benchmarks?Ah, here's the thing:
Qualcomm is using the Oryon-M cores not only for efficiency but also for sustained MT throughput. That's why they are calling them "Performance Cores"
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Essentially, the Oryon-M cores in Snapdragon 8 Elite take up the duties performed by both Cortex A7xx and Cortex A5xx in previous Snapdragon chips.
I would argue that putting 6 Oryon-M cores is actually a sensible engineering decision.All I am saying is that that could do well with 2+4 configuration matching what Apple is doing, but the decision to include 6 was motivated by the marketing as it would look bad if they had fewer than 8 cores next to android competition and they would not get the MT win in Geekbench vs Apple what looks good in the slides
Yes, this is the idea behind adding more weaker cores. Your analysis seems valid but is missing data, I mean we don't how power is being assigned to the individual cores. Are all 8 cores active or maybe it's just 2+2. And until somebody measures that we won't have definitive answer if one can be had Anyway I am afraid we went too far from the original topic of this thread. Maybe we should move further discussion back to the Qualcomm one?I would argue that putting 6 Oryon-M cores is actually a sensible engineering decision.
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Geekerwan review have shown that Oryon-M is not as efficient as A18-E.
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It's close, but there is a gap nonetheless.
What this means is that in terms of efficiency;
[4 Oryon-M] < [4 A18-E]
By putting 2 more Oryon-M cores, they made it more efficency than Apple.
[6 Oryon-M] > [A18-E]
This is due to the nature of Voltage-Frequency curves. As frequency increases, voltage increases exponentially. So power consumption also increases exponentially.
By putting more cores, you can run then at a lower frequency (and thus at a lower power consumption) to match the same performance level.
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That is exactly what you are seeing in this GB6 MT curve.
Qualcomm's cores are individually less efficient than Apple's, but Qualcomm put more of them. Hence why in this MT power curve, 8 Elite is more efficient than A18 Pro at the lower part of the curve.
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Well, yeah, they're something closer to Skymont or Zen4c than any actual real LITTLEs like what Apple ships.That is not guaranteed, because Qualcomm's "E-cores" are much more performant than Apple's.
Absolute performance wise yes.Well, yeah, they're something closer to Skymont or Zen4c than any actual real LITTLEs like what Apple ships.
But has higher consumption and that would hurt battery life.Absolute performance wise yes.
But IPC, core area and scale of the architecture are similar between Oryon-M and A18-E.
Oryon-M is faster because it clocks higher (3.53 GHz vs 2.2 GHz).
Sort of. For BL numbers in LITTLE your main factor is joules spent per workload.But has higher consumption and that would hurt battery life.