Tegra 3

[Icebike]

Our A700 is a quad core, right?

Well no, it is a PentaCore. 5 Countem, Five. I was supprised to learn it spends most of its time running in the 5th core, which is a low powered 500mhz core.

Any time you tap anything, it wakes up the 1.3Ghz quad cores, as many as it needs and gets them all turning and burning. I was under the impression it only used the 5th core in sleep mode, but that appears not to be the case.

 

[Harhumph]

This is why I won't buy another tegra 3 tablet. I had an app tracking cpu clock speed and it sacrifices performance for battery life at all times. I wonder with root if you can disable that fifth core. My A500 is set for 1500mhz at all times and always feels cool, never ever warm.

 

[Icebike]

This is why I won't buy another tegra 3 tablet. I had an app tracking cpu clock speed and it sacrifices performance for battery life at all times. I wonder with root if you can disable that fifth core. My A500 is set for 1500mhz at all times and always feels cool, never ever warm.

That's just a totally ridiculous take on the situation.

Had you paid the slightest bit of attention to the video you would have seen that the scaling from one to 5 cores is instantaneous. That it can play full 1080p full HD video on a 500mhz core with no stutter is impressive.

What did you want them to do, turn on four more cores and burn up your battery for nothing? That's absurd.

Running your A500 at full clock all the time is A) not possible, and B) a total waste of power. You have no clue what you are talking about.
I have and A500. It uses way more power to play the same video at half the resolution.

Look, you sent yours back, so don't hang around posting nonsense just because you want to hate on the 700.
The A500 is a good tablet, but nobody is going to be bringing any new Tegra 2 tabs to market.



Sent from my A700 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Greg_E]

But there is always the Tegra 4 just around the corner with stunning new performance and even better battery life.

Of course this battery/performance tradeoff always has a price and I bet the new Tegra 4 (or whatever the next processor is going to be called) is going to keep a feature similar to Tegra 3 where it turns off as much of the processor as it can in order to save power. As long as there is no lag I can't see it being a problem. We've been dealing with this for years on laptops with speed step or turbo boost so I can't see why this would now be a problem with ARM processors.