![]() In fact, one of the developers behind the Skyline emulator on Android tells me in no uncertain terms that “its sh*t,” and competing SDK solutions for performance profiling by Qualcomm offer better control. Qualcomm doesn’t just sell hardware to companies its software also includes CPU and GPU governors that OEMs can tune “according to their own unique needs,” and Qualcomm has some of its own SDKs for app developers as well, and at least one game developer tells me they’re better than the corresponding tools that Google provides.įor app developers, Google provides tools to help profile app performance, handy when reducing “jank” and troubleshooting other performance issues, but the observed behavior may still vary from device to device, and you can’t tune performance universally.Īndroid did introduce an API to trigger a sustained performance mode with Android 7.0 Nougat, but none of the game developers I spoke to for this piece said they were using it. Some OEMs may decide to throttle in order to save power and others may run unchecked to provide peak performance.” We offer all of our customers an engine and it's up to them to build a chassis around it and constrain power or performance as they see fit. Other customers have implemented different CPU/GPU governors. For example, some OEMs decide to build custom solutions on top of what we offer to manage CPU and GPU frequencies when playing games in order to extend battery life and reduce stutter during gaming. “We allow our customers full flexibility on controlling the behavior of the various compute units in our SoC. And when it comes to how to scale that performance, it’s up to the customer. Qualcomm was also happy to talk about rising heat output and performance profiling in smartphone chipsets, explaining that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, its latest flagship SoC, can scale its performance from a 3W to 9W+ thermal envelope, with plenty of flexibility depending on the cooling situation. It’s much better to have a nice consistent level of performance, rather than a sort of sawtooth where the phone heats up and performance goes down the phone cools down, performance goes back up.” If you don’t reign in your TDP, you’ll get a lot of - I think the term of art is ‘jank,’ where your framerates go up and down. “Someone sitting and playing Fortnite on their phone, on the bus, on their commute. And this introduces two new challenges: heat management and battery life. (Fun fact: One game developer told me this can be a pain if your game is played with a controller because it won’t trigger the same behavior.) But long-running sustained tasks like games also need better continuous performance than these scroll-stop-scroll-stop workloads do. ![]() Many devices explicitly cause a speed boost on touch for this reason. ![]() Speaking to John Poole, founder and president of Geekbench’s parent company, there’s a lot of nuance and attributes to balance between things like increasing TDPs (thermal design power/profile, i.e., the maximum heat a chip can dissipate) and the rise of big cores with big boost clocks (ostensibly handy for short, bursty tasks, but often used for inflating single-core benchmarks above other considerations).Īccording to Poole, “The vast majority of people’s time on a phone is scrolling through webpages, scrolling through Facebook, or something like that,” and short bursts of high performance make sure those intermittent workloads can be handled smoothly and fluidly. Some tasks are best suited to throwing all your power at it with the very biggest cores at once other workloads require sustained performance. As anyone who used a custom kernel during the golden era of rooting and ROMing can tell you, there are many different ways to solve this problem and different sets of logic when it comes to workloads that can be applied. Arguably, it will play the biggest difference as time goes on.ĭifferent apps have different requirements when it comes to speed, and your to-do list probably doesn’t need as much oomph as the latest, prettiest games do. And, though it’s an issue you can address with hardware solutions, software can also play a difference. Some smartphone makers have gone so far as to highlight technologies like vapor chambers, surface area in cooling solutions, and bleeding-edge materials like graphene to improve cooling performance. More recently, as speeds have increased in the flagship space, causing the chips inside them to produce more heat, new cooling solutions have proven necessary. This limits the speeds for the chips in smartphones based on what can be ambiently cooled.
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