Timeline for Why do Android phones have more cores than computers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Jun 14, 2017 at 10:55 | comment | added | Paghillect | @v6ak You are absolutely right. The problem is that in an Android application, everything (including services and broadcast receivers which are the operating system's messaging facilities) runs on the UI thread by default which can negatively affect performance. This is however becoming less of a problem as Google has introduced efficient threading facilities and later platform versions prohibit doing I/O on the main thread at build time. | |
| Jun 14, 2017 at 10:50 | comment | added | Paghillect | @v6ak RAM is certainly an issue. The JVM is a very resource hungry process and having lots of RAM allows the operating system to keep as much of the application in main memory, reducing the time it takes to switch between them and etc. Also a reason behind why these Android flagships have ridiculously high amount of RAM. | |
| Jun 14, 2017 at 6:39 | comment | added | v6ak | Also, programming style like performing I/O (or other long operations) in UI thread can make apps laggy regardless of CPU performance. AFAIK, this style is quite common in early Android apps. Such apps can be laggy even with modern phones. They will be probably less laggy, but that's more due to faster flash memories than faster CPUs or more cores. | |
| Jun 13, 2017 at 20:10 | comment | added | v6ak | “The early generations of Android devices were famous for lagging, crashing and many other unfortunate things” – I remember running Marshmallow on such phone (Xperia Mini Pro), and I think that there are many other reasons for being slow than CPU. They run on low RAM had slower flash devices like MTD (much slower than microSD cards for some operations), older Androids had a less efficient “JVM” (which is not technically a JVM). Sure, better CPU also helps, but I would be far from such conclusion. | |
| Jun 13, 2017 at 20:01 | comment | added | v6ak | “There could be many more threads per application for doing file access, network, etc” – those are rather I/O-bound, not consuming much CPU. Sometimes, I/O is handled just by one thread, because CPU is much faster than I/O devices. | |
| Jun 13, 2017 at 19:59 | comment | added | v6ak | “This allows manufacturers to throw any hardware they want before needing to worry about application compatibility.” – good point, but I am not sure if this was the intention for a system intended (originally) for cameras. | |
| Jun 13, 2017 at 14:50 | comment | added | maaartinus | This is a nice explanation why mobile phones are much more powerful than desktops. Or aren't they? | |
| Jun 13, 2017 at 7:02 | review | First posts | |||
| Jun 13, 2017 at 7:05 | |||||
| Jun 13, 2017 at 7:02 | history | answered | Paghillect | CC BY-SA 3.0 |