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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

For years, there were multiple Android SoCs with stupid amounts of cores, a mixup between 2 or 3 core types, and the end result is that pretty much all contemporary matchups between the best and worst Apple SoCs and ARM SoCs put in Android phones were favoring the glorious fruit company.

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Underappreciated fact - the Apple SoCs since A10 (iPhone 7, etc) are also big.LITTLE designs! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10

You're correct, I was not aware of this. You've invalidated my argument and I stand corrected.

And Macs are now big.LITTLE as well. I’m curious how this compares to what apple does for macOS.

A10 was kind of a strange big.LITTLE in that it could only run one set at a time. Future revisions fixed this.

I'm curious if the existing cpu performance of even mid-range modern phone SoCs is really even used by most users. I suspect gamering and winning benchmarks may be the primary use cases.

I was trying to reduce power consumption on my phone, and disabled all but one low perf core (the phone's SoC has 2 high perf and 4 low perf cores), and things were very noticeably laggy.

But, then, I tried with only two low perf cores enabled. Everything that I used my phone for (calls, messaging, notes, web browsing with an ad blocker) worked fine. So, the extra four disabled cores really didn't affect my ?average? use case.

I was concerned about consumption during active usage, not idle, but disabling the cores didn't affect power consumption for either (even with only one enabled).

Is the SoC in question even capable of physically powering down individual cores?

It is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G. I assumed there would be aggressive power gating for a mobile processor, but I have no idea. Google didn't turn up anything. Maybe in some doc behind an NDA?

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