Why Cortex A7 feels faster than Cortex A9 processors?

pinoy

Limp Gawd
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Dec 8, 2010
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My LG G Vista phone is equipped with a Qualcomm Cortex A7 1.2 GHz cpu and Adreno 305 GPU. My Insignia tablet has a Rockchip Cortex A9 1.6 GHz and Mali 400 GPU. Why does my phone runs smoother than the tablet even though it has a lower clocked and previous generation ARM cpu? Scrolling the screen is way smoother with the phone. Is the Qualcomm better manufactured than Rockchip?
 
The G Vista is a midrange phone using a Qualcomm chip. Rockchip is known as a chinese budget chip, used in the lowest of low end, and bootleg phones. Yes, the Qualcomm is manufactured better.

Also, A7 vs A9 is meaningless. Look at the other specs. Your tablet has next to no ram. It's a bargain basement tablet that was $70 new, Vs a low to midrange phone. I mean...
 
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I'd say that nand speed is likely the thing that causes the difference.
 
The Mali GPU is underperforming by a considerable margin for one thing compared to the Adreno. In this and all such situations, it's not just the clock speeds or RAM that really matter in the long run, it's the software and how optimized it happens to be. The sheer fact that Android has never been a bare-metal OS is still what cripples it more than anything else compared to iOS which was designed to run bare-metal on the given platform without the idiotic runtime crap that Android has always had to rely on. Yes, ART has made some big improvements since it came around but it's still just a virtual machine running on top of another layer on another layer on top of the bare metal.

Why they can't just go back and say "Fuck it, let's do this right..." is somewhat irritating and probably always will be, they never should have done Android the way they did.

I still own a BlackBerry Z10 and just upgraded that to the full 10.3.3 release from a few weeks ago and it's snappier and more responsive than it was when I got in in the past and it's 4 years old powered by a dual core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus SoC with 2GB of RAM and it runs circles around most budget devices even today. I grabbed an LG Stylo 2 Plus a few days ago, Snapdragon 430 8-core - that's 8 freakin' cores - and the Z10 still "feels faster" in regular operation almost all the time. Of course the Z10 is using a real-time OS (QNX) base so that's part of it but like I said, it's software and how optimized it happens to be on the given platform.
 
Yeah, if you're complaining about interface speeds, that's entirely on the GPU.
 
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it's 4 years old powered by a dual core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus SoC with 2GB of RAM and it runs circles around most budget devices even today. I grabbed an LG Stylo 2 Plus a few days ago, Snapdragon 430 8-core - that's 8 freakin' cores - and the Z10 still "feels faster" in regular operation almost all the time. the Z10 is using a real-time OS (QNX) base so that's part of it but like I said, it's software and how optimized it happens to be on the given platform.

Apples to oranges. The AMD FX was 6-8 cores and bested pretty handily by 4 core intel offerings of the same generation. The fact remains this is a tablet that was bargain basement when it was new ($70 MSRP), had the bare minimum amount of ram to make the device even usable, and is powered by a chipmaker that's only known for powering just above bootleg phones.
 
Are you saying the same ARM cpu model by different brands can have different performances?
 
Are you saying the same ARM cpu model by different brands can have different performances?

Yes, it depends on how much optimization the ones making the silicon did.

See here, where the hacked-together Qualcomm 810 has performance problems on the same process node as Samsung's Exynos 5433, even though they have the same number of cores, and similar GPU performance.

It performed well on the larger demo platform, but throttled in phones. You can only do do much about heat inside a tiny phone case.

On top of that, you have software optimization issues. Most power management on Android is done in software, and how well-optimized those power profiles are can also affect how responsive your phone is.

This is why you look up actual reviews of a device, rather than just blindly compare specs.
 
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