APQ8064

I was lucky enough to play around with a device using this Qualcomm SoC for the past few days and discovered many interesting things .Naturally not everything is perfect with this solution as with most others .

First of all I suppose there is the performance issue . Well , the phone even at this very early stage of it's development is fast , very fast , extremely fast .... almost always . 

Four Krait cores are better than two in most cases and when you push the phone a little harder you see that they can really make a difference .

Sadly though , aside from some benchmarks that can really stress them or even just force them to work all together , in most other usage cases , the phone simply will not use all of it's cores at the same time .

browsing heavy web pages is certainly one way to go , but in this case most of the job is done by the also amazing Adreno 320 GPU .

There is hardly any way to make the phone slow down and actually try to perform a task , no matter how hard you try . With that being said , some quite interesting things popped up after searching a little harder .

Krait cores are really different than the A-9's used in most other phones but at the same time , in some cases their performance is not that much better . When comparing their benchmark results with other solutions running more or less at the same speed , you realize that most of the performance advantage comes from their number , being four of them and not from the different architecture .

Their floating point performance seems to be better , but very slightly and it's only in different aspects like integer and memory performance that they really stand out from everything else available .

Comparing each core individually and at the same clock speed with an out-of-the-box ARM A-9 shows that  the difference is not so huge .

However , since the SoC contains four of them , the actual performance is that matters and there the APQ8064 is really amazing .

While benchmarking is something that just shows you numbers and does not represent real life performance , it gives you an idea about what each phone is capable of , when all of it's potential is properly used .

I seriously doubt however that a game or an application of any kind will push this specific SoC to it's limits any time soon , because optimizing in such a high level is something that no-one is willing to do for a Qualcomm solution .

The only application I could find that could scratch the surface of it's potential processing power was the video creating one that comes with Android itself . creating 1080p videos is a task that completes much faster that in any other mobile phone , although this could also mean that the application is highly optimized on this specific phone .

Now let's move to the really interesting part . The phone in hand has a 1080p screen , yes a 1080p one .

This means that when the GPU draws anything on it , from just the interface to a game or a benchmark , it has to create quite more pixels than most other GPUs in most other phones .

The Adreno 320 is really amazing simply because it manages to do exactly that without trying . Scrolling through the UI , browsing web pages , even running benchmarks like NenaMark 2 will not slow it down even for a second . 

Drawing many thumbnails in the gallery applications is the only way to see the phone actually working but this can very well be a NAND memory speed issue and not a computational one .

Noothing else in the Android market comes even close to providing this kind of graphical performance when we talk for screens of this size at least , although the results of the Nexus 10 tablet will probably be better , but at this case everything is done inside a tablet and not a mobile phone , and it provides much more space for heat dissipation .

This brings us to the only real problem with this SoC , a problem that is much more serious than in any other mobile phone using anything else .

The APQ8064 produces excessive amounts of heat . Really , the phone becomes so hot that someone not familiar with the technical aspects of such things , may actually believe that the phone will be fried and stop working .

This huge heat production means two things that are both quite important . First of all , heat is generated from energy , power consumption to be more exact . The APQ8064 draws a LOT of power when pushed to it's limit and aside from the fact that you can actually feel it in your hand , there is also the battery indicator that drops faster than in a laptop working at full load . 

The second one is that the phone has to throttle down it's overall performance to try and compensate , which results in dramatic loss of performance . 

Dramatic is exactly the right expression , since after using the phone for no more than 10 minutes to perform most every day tasks , the performance drop is such that stops being any different from any other solution .

Most of the heat is generated from the GPU and not the CPU cores since they rarely if ever work all together at maximum speed when not running a benchmark for this task .

drawing 1920x1080 pixels just to show a text message received is something or to scroll through the phone book is a task that requires some processing to be made on the GPU , with the sheer number of pixels being enough to stress it .

Granted this is also a design issue of this specific device , and Qualcomm is not the only one to blame here .

However , since thin mobile phones is what the market wants , and designing thin , lightweight phones is not an option but a necessity , I suppose that this problem is one that will have to be addressed from Qualcomm too . 

Just two Krait cores inside the HTC One S were enough to heat the phone to an extreme level when atively used during a hot summer day , and since the phone at hand now was operated at a quite colder period of the year .

I can only imagine what will happen when someone uses it to take successive photos during the summer . Actually this is a funny thing , since the phone refuses to even open the camera application when it becomes hot and even closes it automatically if it gets hot while shooting photos . This can really be annoying when you are somewhere using it for browsing facebook for example and you just want to take a picture and upload it . 

So I guess that managing to fit more and more CPU's and more powerfull graphics inside a mobile SoC is not just a task of actually fitting them in there . There is also the important matter of making it work in us many usage scenarios as possible . And this is where the APQ8064 or even the MSM8960 falls short of the competition . It's almost impossible to create a thin lightweight device that can also dissipate the heat generated from this two powerful SoC's and this makes using their potential power even harder .

Designing a game for example that could make use of the power inside the APQ8064 and producing great graphics on a 1080p screen is not just a developer's task , it's also an engineering one since actually using any phone based on it at full throttle for an extended period of time is impossible . There is also the matter of the excessive battery consumption , that makes it even more complicated . I hardly think that anyone will be willing to buy a phone that can play games comparable to a gaming console but will have to find a charger after playing such a game for more than an hour since no matter how powerfull phones get , they are still required for communications of any kind along with everything else