The future of processors

[SIred]

Currently running an i5 4670K which I paid just short of £200 in the first month of release which for me is a LOT of money but I fancied a nice upgrade of board chip ram and ssd and was heavily pleased with the result.. something that I only did being an intel only since I built my first P1 133 and ridden the intel train through P2-3-4 and core duo without failure or flaw.

Now I guess like many I am no form of genius in understanding processors and all the critical stuff about them but it just occurred to me...

My wife and I have THL T6 Pro phones which have been out since late last year and they have Octa core 1.4 processors in. The thing is, I paid more than three times as much for this i5 as the phone was itself just £80 and now available for £60 on a certain bay.

Now given the price of the phone and a rough guess at the processor costing a third of that (feeling a little generous given the other parts) I'm starting to feel sure the processor on wholesale is Less than £10 or $15 maybe much less. Let's just call it £20 as an end public cost adding profits and taxes.

That's 10 Octa core processors for the price of an i5, while granted there is maybe 18 months between release. The Octa cores coming out now from THL are 1.7 not 1.4

Anyhow, staying with my current phone processor and pc processor, the equivalent CPS is over 100Ghz of processing power.

Again, I do not pledge to know or understand the intrinsic technology and limits or where they are applicable aside from these numbers but are we about to hit massive computing power possibilities ? I do know however we would be requiring some serious cooling as you can expect a hardworking multi-tasking Octa core gets warm.

Am I going somewhere logical on this line of thinking ?

Intrigued.

Stan

[Kevin_M_Intel]

Hello Banton,

I understand your point when comparing both processors but it is important to say that both are completely different. The processor for the desktop system can deliver a huge processing power vs the cellphone processor. I am saying this because the phone processor is made for mobile systems and eventhough it is an octa core processor it cannot be compare with the desktop processor due to the design.

In many ways, the desktop processor is much better than a cellphone processor and this is where the price of the product will be visible.

Kevin M

[AP16]

No, there is no logic, at least in your example comparison. The MT6592M CPU of your smartphone uses an old Cortex-A7 cores, which are low-power, in-order architecture - thats why Mediatek was able to pack eight of such into one chip. Compare it to Atom line of Intel CPUs, where Atom x7-Z8700 have four out-of-order (more like i5 architecture) cores inside USD 35 chip, at same frequency as MTK chip. And yes, array of simple cores cannot be used well against complex, high-IPC CPUs, both in end-user and even many server tasks, what was clearly shown by histories of IBM Cell, Sun Niagara or AMD Bulldozer.