...this mattered a LOT in 2014 when Android handset makers got their butts handed to them by Apple over 64-bit:https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6076457/htc-desire-510-64-bit-android …
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MEANWHILE IN CUPERTINO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11
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Yes, you're reading that right: between the A10 and the A11, Apple went from 3MB L2/4MB L3 to *8MB L2*
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For a sense of scale: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers … https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html …
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So back to our $100 phone. The slow-clocked (1.3Ghz) A53 cores are missing _any_ discernible cache. What does that mean?
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It means that anything that isn't a tight loop on a small amount of data is going to suffer a main-memory read.
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...and main-memory reads are 200x more expensive than local (L1) reads. Need that data to keep doing work? Tough luck.
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These situations are called "stalls" or "waits"; CPU is spun up, but it's not retiring instructions (doing work): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_state
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...which means that one of the worst effects of the cores-not-caches tradeoff in this phone is that it loses *power efficiency* too.
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The best trade in mobile CPU design today is to swap caches for cores (looking at you
@qualcomm,@SamsungSemiUS, &@MediaTek)Show this thread -
So how slow is the
@MediaTek MT6737? Lets go to the film! Here are some devices built with this chip:https://www.kimovil.com/en/list-smartphones-by-processor/mediatek-mt6737 …Show this thread -
...and they all score like this: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4478849
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This is 8-9x slower than the iPhone 8: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/51
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