Is core clock speed more important than the number of cores?
The processor in a smartphone is not just a single chip—it’s a complete package that offers multiple functions, known as an SoC (System on Chip).
An SoC is an integrated circuit that contains most of the components that drive the device’s “brain.” In a typical smartphone or tablet, an SoC includes the device’s processor and GPU cores, additional processors for functions like AI acceleration, reserved space for caching data and memory required by the system, a digital signal processor (DSP) for functions like camera capture and audio, external interfaces for various communication protocols, and wireless modems for connectivity.
There are also components like timers, regulators, or power management ICs, which don’t actually affect performance. It’s also worth noting that some wireless modems and device memory modules can either be part of the SoC or external, depending on the device.
In short, a tiny chip inside the device needs to run many things, requires a lot of power, and generates a lot of heat while operating.
Some companies customize SoCs to provide unique experiences, while others design SoCs to work across various devices. Each approach has its pros and cons, but your device is likely using the latter type, an SoC produced by companies like Qualcomm. These companies strive to make chips that perform well for their intended use; chips designed for smartwatches aren’t suitable for smartphones, and vice versa. But they all use the same basic concept—building a hardware combination where each component complements the others, resulting in a cohesive user experience.
Quantity Determines Speed For the performance you expect from devices like smartphones, what you really need is balance. Ideally, some cores aren’t very fast, while others are, and the software is designed to distribute the load in a way that provides the right combination of speed and battery life. Achieving this balance at all levels is quite challenging.
A CPU (central processing unit) core can only do one thing at a time. All computer processing involves mathematical operations, and the cores inside a CPU can’t really think ahead or look back; they can only solve one problem at a time and then move on to the next.
Clock speed—the GHz number you see in specifications—determines the speed at which each operation is executed. All operations are carried out at an incredible speed (millions of operations per second), and the higher the clock speed, the faster each operation is completed.
The number of cores determines how many tasks can be executed simultaneously. If one core can perform 100,000 tasks per second (which no CPU core is actually this slow, but this is an easy number to calculate), then five cores can perform 500,000 tasks per second. The more cores a CPU has, the more tasks can run concurrently.
Threads are sets of instructions for CPU cores. They share resources with the process that created them, but their switching speed is so fast that it seems like a CPU core is doing multiple things at once.
If you have a CPU with multiple fast cores, threads will make things happen quickly, to the point where it appears multiple things are happening simultaneously, because our brains aren’t nearly as fast as CPU cores.
To get a good user experience, you need fast sequential processing performance on a single core, fast unordered (using threads) computing performance on a single core, and super-fast sequential and unordered processing on multiple cores. This is where software comes into play.
In general, the faster the CPU core, the faster applications will run on devices like smartphones. The faster the multi-core, the more background tasks can be performed, including running multiple applications simultaneously. This is why both single-core and multi-core performance are important.
Certain software, like games or video editing programs, can be written to take advantage of multiple CPU cores, thus distributing processes and threads across cores in a single application.
Is core clock speed more important than the number of cores? There is no answer to this question because the right combination of core count, core speed, and the software that utilizes the cores is what truly matters.
From the original performance benchmarks to today’s SoC systems, most users don’t pay much attention to specifications when buying a phone because the basic computing power is sufficient. However, chips are becoming more important. Over time, you’ll notice differences in experience, and as smartphones become more ubiquitous, even the smallest detail in user experience can lead to huge differences. If a phone is an extension of the human body, then the chip determines how strong your expansion capabilities are.
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