Considering the minimal effort Xiaomi has been putting into cooling of their socs in their previous phones it seems that the large cores insta-throttle and in are nearly never online.
The RN3 in India never had Mediatek's Helio X10 or whatever, it was launched with SD650 but the RN$ is a definite downgrade for more than one reason. The GPU is barely half as good as the RN3 variant, that they've still gone ahead with the full HD screen makes it less of an option for someone like me, who owns the SD650 Indian variant of RN3. Now had they reduced the screen size to 5 inch & the resolution to 720p it'd made more sense, certainly the GPU pushing less pixels would've been more appropriate but alas most people look at full HD & not pay much attention to the full SoC.
This must have crazy good battery life. I get 10hrs(?) of screen time on the redmi note 3. 25% more is amazing. At this point I would be happy to sacrifice that extra battery life in order to have a thinner phone
"It would seem that vendors are willing to take the hit on price and performance in exchange for battery life"
Another huge motivator is that it allows vendors to market the phone as "octa" instead of "hex" core. How many consumers actually know that 2xA73 (or A72 for that matter) > 4xA53 for the "big" cores? That's a hard sell when all most consumers see/understand is 8 cores vs 6.
As a question... is there actually any practical need whatsoever for quad cores on the "little" cluster (A53 or whatever)? Surely if there ever is actually sufficient workload to peg 3+ cores on the A53 cluster, the SOC would ideally fire up the "big" cluster anyway?
Yes, there are workloads that utilize 4 A53 cores. OEMs can also tune the load threshold that migrates threads to the big cluster, so it could set the threshold higher to keep threads on the A53s and save power.
So the background tasks/light workloads targeted by the "little" clusters are sufficiently threaded to regularly utilise 3-4 cores? Wow, that's interesting and not the response I was expecting. Thanks.
Interesting that Apple decided to stick to a 2+2 arrangement for A10 then, especially given that they seem willing to throw die size at anything that'll improve either performance or battery life.
I'd be curious to understand the sorts of workloads that can peg 3+ A53 cores on a phone without justifying firing up the big cluster. Anyone have insights on this?
Web browsing. Light threads for image rendering and scrolling, a big fat core kicks in for JavaScript as it's single threaded. Remember, even the A72 isn't as heavily out of order as Intel's desktop CPUs they are still pretty narrow. So spreading a multithreaded parrellel workload over weaker cores can be faster and more power efficient.
No it doesn't. Its the English translation for 'Hongmi', which is how Redmi phones are sold in China. Hongmi means Red Rice in Mandarin AFAIK.
BTW, the phone was launched last Thursday, so it shouldn't have taken AT almost a week to report it!
Either way, the article is littered with errors from start to finish! AT is going to the dogs since ALS left. The RN3 (SD version) supported 9 different LTE bands, this one supports just 3 - Band 3 and 5 (FDD) and Band 40 (TDD). They were disclosed on the launch day itself.
Second error: Honor 6X is powered by the Kirin 655 SoC, not Snapdragon 625 or anything else by Qualcomm for that matter. Kirin chips are designed in-house by Huawei.
Thirdly, the device comes with Android 6 Marshmallow with MIUI 8, not Android 7 Nougat. The Nougat update, however, is currently in beta and is expected to be rolled out OTA in the coming weeks.
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tipoo - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
"which is a shift from a tri-cluster 10-core A72/A53/A53 design to a full A53/A53 eight-core SoC. "Sounds like a downgrade. Two A72s and two A53s alone would be a better setup for the vast majority of phone use than infinity A53s.
Alexey291 - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
Considering the minimal effort Xiaomi has been putting into cooling of their socs in their previous phones it seems that the large cores insta-throttle and in are nearly never online.R0H1T - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
The RN3 in India never had Mediatek's Helio X10 or whatever, it was launched with SD650 but the RN$ is a definite downgrade for more than one reason. The GPU is barely half as good as the RN3 variant, that they've still gone ahead with the full HD screen makes it less of an option for someone like me, who owns the SD650 Indian variant of RN3.Now had they reduced the screen size to 5 inch & the resolution to 720p it'd made more sense, certainly the GPU pushing less pixels would've been more appropriate but alas most people look at full HD & not pay much attention to the full SoC.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
The 625 in my moto z play works well. It is about as fast as my SD800 in my nexus 5 from 2013. which is more then enough.As long as you dont have some heavy OEM skin, arm chips have gotten silly overpowered for phones.
Although, if OEMs were interested in better battery, they would make the batteries removable o we could put bigger ones in.
En1gma - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
>>Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is powered by the Snapdragon 650only two versions of the three versions of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 based on sd650
ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
So the Snapdragon Note 3 has substantially more powerful hardware than India's Note 4.Seriously, these little.LITTLE SoCs really need to go. Here's hoping ARM can finally convince chinese SoC makers to use 2*A73+4*A53 instead of 8xA53.
0iron - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
I wonder if this is mean Qualcomm make unfavourable for OEM to choose 650/652 & promote heavily for 625 just to protect their 'meh' Kryo 8xx?ianmills - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
This must have crazy good battery life. I get 10hrs(?) of screen time on the redmi note 3. 25% more is amazing. At this point I would be happy to sacrifice that extra battery life in order to have a thinner phonexype - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
Anyone knows what kind of video this thing can record? I guess no 4k, and no 1080p60, either?View From The Top - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
1080p @30fps both front and back. Primary camera also records 120fps slow-mo videos @720fps.rhysiam - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
"It would seem that vendors are willing to take the hit on price and performance in exchange for battery life"Another huge motivator is that it allows vendors to market the phone as "octa" instead of "hex" core. How many consumers actually know that 2xA73 (or A72 for that matter) > 4xA53 for the "big" cores? That's a hard sell when all most consumers see/understand is 8 cores vs 6.
As a question... is there actually any practical need whatsoever for quad cores on the "little" cluster (A53 or whatever)? Surely if there ever is actually sufficient workload to peg 3+ cores on the A53 cluster, the SOC would ideally fire up the "big" cluster anyway?
Matt Humrick - Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - link
Yes, there are workloads that utilize 4 A53 cores. OEMs can also tune the load threshold that migrates threads to the big cluster, so it could set the threshold higher to keep threads on the A53s and save power.rhysiam - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
So the background tasks/light workloads targeted by the "little" clusters are sufficiently threaded to regularly utilise 3-4 cores? Wow, that's interesting and not the response I was expecting. Thanks.Interesting that Apple decided to stick to a 2+2 arrangement for A10 then, especially given that they seem willing to throw die size at anything that'll improve either performance or battery life.
I'd be curious to understand the sorts of workloads that can peg 3+ A53 cores on a phone without justifying firing up the big cluster. Anyone have insights on this?
Pissedoffyouth - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
Web browsing. Light threads for image rendering and scrolling, a big fat core kicks in for JavaScript as it's single threaded. Remember, even the A72 isn't as heavily out of order as Intel's desktop CPUs they are still pretty narrow. So spreading a multithreaded parrellel workload over weaker cores can be faster and more power efficient.whitecliff90 - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
The redmi 4 prime and redmi note 4 use the same chipset, I sense cost saving.Hareesh - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
What will come 2GB ram variant ?Zak - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
Curious: does "redmi" mean anything in India or is it a play on "read me"?View From The Top - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link
No it doesn't. Its the English translation for 'Hongmi', which is how Redmi phones are sold in China. Hongmi means Red Rice in Mandarin AFAIK.BTW, the phone was launched last Thursday, so it shouldn't have taken AT almost a week to report it!
Either way, the article is littered with errors from start to finish! AT is going to the dogs since ALS left. The RN3 (SD version) supported 9 different LTE bands, this one supports just 3 - Band 3 and 5 (FDD) and Band 40 (TDD). They were disclosed on the launch day itself.
Second error: Honor 6X is powered by the Kirin 655 SoC, not Snapdragon 625 or anything else by Qualcomm for that matter. Kirin chips are designed in-house by Huawei.
Thirdly, the device comes with Android 6 Marshmallow with MIUI 8, not Android 7 Nougat. The Nougat update, however, is currently in beta and is expected to be rolled out OTA in the coming weeks.