Multithreading & Mobile Apps

[Chiropteran]

Serious question: are there any android (or ios or wp8) apps that actually make use of more than two threads, and perform noticeably better on quad core devices?

 

[lothar]

Linpack?

 

[soccerballtux]

^lol

Serious question: are there any android (or ios or wp8) apps that actually make use of more than two threads, and perform noticeably better on quad core devices?

The garbage collector could be free to run on the 3rd / 4th core freeing the main cores to forge forward.

I don't know if this is how garbage collectors work, but it's the best I can come up with.

Having a quad core A15 would be awesome right now. Get a good case and you'll be set for several years.

 

[you2]

I have no proof they do but I would hope some of hte video decoders use multi-core.

 

[exdeath]

Multiple single threaded apps and services?

 

[bearxor]

I have no proof they do but I would hope some of hte video decoders use multi-core.

Video decoding would mostly be done by the phones GPU.

 

[XenIneX]

I have no proof they do but I would hope some of hte video decoders use multi-core.

Only if you want your battery to tap out before the movie does. Far better to use hardware decode.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Serious question: are there any android (or ios or wp8) apps that actually make use of more than two threads, and perform noticeably better on quad core devices?

The app I'm making is multi-threaded, but it performs noticeably better on faster dual-core (Snapdragon S4) devices than on quad-core (Tegra 3) devices.

In all honesty, though, it ain't that hard to plug:

new Handler().post(new Runnable() {public void run() {}}

...when applicable. Plus Android now actually requires multi-threading for certain things to work.

 

[dagamer34]

The app I'm making is multi-threaded, but it performs noticeably better on faster dual-core (Snapdragon S4) devices than on quad-core (Tegra 3) devices.

In all honesty, though, it ain't that hard to plug:



...when applicable. Plus Android now actually requires multi-threading for certain things to work.

Efficient multi-threaded coding is hard. Just spawning off threads haphazardly is a nice way to kill your battery.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Efficient multi-threaded coding is hard. Just spawning off threads haphazardly is a nice way to kill your battery.

Spawning thread doesn't kill battery. Keeping Activities (read: processes) running in the background does. Android defaults to not killing any app, so a bad coder will leave his application running in the background indefinitely, which is not good.

And like I said, Android does require threads to be spawned for certain things. For instance, at the end of a transition animation for any View, you gotta spawn a thread in order to remove a View that is no longer visible on the screen. If you try to remove the View without spawning a thread, the main loop will moan... and then throw a little tantrum, which will most likely crash your app.

 

[you2]

Bullshit. It is easy to develop event driven multi-thread programs. The problem is idiots who write polling based programs that are multi-threaded and spin the threads while waiting for events. Poor programming does not mean it is difficult; it just means some people are sloppy.

Efficient multi-threaded coding is hard. Just spawning off threads haphazardly is a nice way to kill your battery.

 

[dguy6789]

Smooth performance when running multiple apps and services is the primary benefit of multi core, not improving single app performance. The same goes for traditional PCs. Multi threaded apps that scale extremely well are just icing on the cake to look forward to later.