Database Users

Disadvantages to enabling more cores?

Hi, I was going through my kernel setting and I saw that it has a maximum of only two cores enabled at any time. I was wondering if, out side of the battery, if there are any other disadvantages or risks of more enabled cores. I'm sure this question is a stupid one, but I will have to learn from somewhere.

You neglect to mention which kernel you're using but I'll hazard a guess that it might be M-Kernel because that's the only one that I know of (currently) that by default is set to use 2 cores - Metallice has a post in the M-Kernel thread where he states why he's chosen the 2 core default over 4.
Basically it comes down to the understanding that Android was designed for 2 cores and most - which means the overwhelming majority, mind you - every app that's out there will use no more than 2 cores by default, with a very few (like less than 10 or so) apps will seriously push more than 2 cores to any significant degrees.
2 cores = less power usage = longer battery life overall = doesn't make that much difference in regular day to day use of any given quad core Android-powered device.
All 4 cores kick in for a variety of reasons but when they do it's usually just temporary, a momentary spike in CPU power to handle something faster and then it's right back to idle/offline status. In general, the only thing you might notice is a tiny bit of lag with using 2 cores in starting up apps or other such momentary situations that can make use of more CPU processing power but then they end up shutting off again.
In the long run, having 4 cores is more of a luxury than an absolute necessity. There's a video on YouTube of a guy using a Samsung Galaxy Note II and running 4 videos at the same time on the device; that's about the only time he could get it to require all 4 cores being utilized and even then they were far from being maxed out unless he had some other stuff going on at the same time.
Your battery will thank you by utilizing that ROM's default of 2 cores - if you really really need all 4 cores you'll know it and you can easily enable the other cores with something like Trickster Mod which is what Metallice recommends for M-Kernel tweaking anyway (the only app he recommends, actually).
You really should read or at the bare minimum skim the thread about the kernel you're using, even if the thread is very long - it's more useful to read and learn stuff than creating new threads for such info which is generally frowned upon around here.
Self-research is the best course of action, aka finding out for yourself from the volumes of info this forum has.

Thank you, I am sorry that I forgot to mention the kernel, and yes, it is m kernel. I thought I said it but it seems I didn't.

i9505 poor gaming performance

I have poor gaming performance on my i9505. It's not lagging, but the FPS is not high enought to play the games smoothly. Actually I was waiting that all games will run smooth, when I was buing i9505, but I'm really disappointed.
for example Real Racing 3 doesnt run smoothly on high and ultra high details (which are default for i9505)- the more cars on the screen, the poor the performance.
Simpsons Tapped out - the same problem, game is lagging on some parts of the city. Actually the game has the same poor performance as on galaxy S2.
GTA Vice City also poor performance on medium and higher details.
Doesn't helps to restart the phone, there is enough available RAM +200MB when playing any game. The CPU monitor shows, that 1core runs on 100%, second core 50% and 3,4th core 0% on every game, clock is set aroung 1GHz. I'm running stock android 4.3 with touchwiz
Is it a problem of poor GPU performance, or the apps are not optimized?
Does anybody other has the same problem?
maybe there is an solution to lock GPU clock and prevent phone from downgrading the GPU clock...

Why is the phone running at 1GHz? Stock for the phone is 1.9GHz?

energy savings on?

no no, the phone is running OK, I don't have enabled power saving.
The clock of the CPU changes depending on the CPU load - it works good.
But for example, when I'm playing real racing 3 on default graphics settings, the CPU clock changes, but in average, the clock is around 1.2GHz and usually only 2 cores active. But sometimes and all it's cores goes on 100%. - this works OK.
But I don't understand, why most of the games are not smooth, and doesn't load the cpu on 100% to get smoother - that's the problem. Or maybe it's a problem of GPU?
Or the question could be: How to get the maximum performance from i9505? Because I don't think, that the games are using all of the phone performance and therefore the games are not smooth.

niio said:
no no, the phone is running OK, I don't have enabled power saving.
The clock of the CPU changes depending on the CPU load - it works good.
But for example, when I'm playing real racing 3 on default graphics settings, the CPU clock changes, but in average, the clock is around 1.2GHz and usually only 2 cores active. But sometimes and all it's cores goes on 100%. - this works OK.
But I don't understand, why most of the games are not smooth, and doesn't load the cpu on 100% to get smoother - that's the problem. Or maybe it's a problem of GPU?
Or the question could be: How to get the maximum performance from i9505? Because I don't think, that the games are using all of the phone performance and therefore the games are not smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gameloft and other companies have not remotely optimised their games for the S4 archetecture, so they just lag and run poorly. ART in Kitkat may well solve a lot of this issue once it is fully implemented and supported. Some games run fantastically well (bard's tale) and others (gameloft, gta vice city and others) run absolutely awful. I installed them on S3 and they run great, and the CPU useage and GPU is far better. It's a mix of the S4 and the game devs. OpenGL ES3.0 helps in 4.3 (especially google edition, touchwiz slows EVERYTHING) and ART hopefully will help again in 4.4.

RossFixxed said:
Gameloft and other companies have not remotely optimised their games for the S4 archetecture, so they just lag and run poorly. ART in Kitkat may well solve a lot of this issue once it is fully implemented and supported. Some games run fantastically well (bard's tale) and others (gameloft, gta vice city and others) run absolutely awful. I installed them on S3 and they run great, and the CPU useage and GPU is far better. It's a mix of the S4 and the game devs. OpenGL ES3.0 helps in 4.3 (especially google edition, touchwiz slows EVERYTHING) and ART hopefully will help again in 4.4.
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so one option is to flash stock android without touchwiz, or second option is to wait for 4.4, which will come in next year?

niio said:
so one option is to flash stock android without touchwiz, or second option is to wait for 4.4, which will come in next year?
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I find the Google Edition better, but far from perfect for gaming. I'm using a rom for Google Edition. 4.4 can be flashed now with ART support, but as it is Alpha/Beta status at the moment (even though alpha/beta aren't used as they actually are in software testing) so there are niggles and bugs. I'd say flash 4.3 and see if any better, keep backups, and maybe if you're adventurous try 4.4.
As I say it's better but badly optimised games will just be badly optimised games that lag and stutter. That's gameloft in my experience in general. Filter reviews by 'from this device model only' on the play store and see how many 1 star reveiws there are from S4 users. The S3 is far faster with the same games side by side. ART better sort this rubbish out!

so maybe it's a reason to move to iOS, where the apps are perfectly optimized

niio said:
so maybe it's a reason to move to iOS, where the apps are perfectly optimized
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As much as I love Android, the user experience on iOS is really really lovely. The games load so well and they tend (not always) to run great! Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I don't buy into this calling names rubbish android forums always devlove into. The best user experience for me on all my devices is the iPad. It's pretty much perfect out of the box.
Obvioiusly iOS is very restrictive and closed and the keyboard drives me mad, but yeah it's a good alternative to Android.
Writing an Android app is an exercise in sacrifice. Hey there's a cool new feature in 4.3 I can use for notifications... and 95% of my customer base is gone already on older versions etc. It's very, very annoying. And throw in OEM messing with the OS and you have a huge fragmented mess on your hands.
iOS ain't perfect but let's not be totally blinded to its positive points.
EDIT: My current setup I tend to use most is my S4 (GE rom) and iPad for tablet. Seem to suit best

Honor 7 stutter while scrolling on some apps

I've had the Honor 7 for almost a month now and it's a great phone, I have noticed one or two issues in regards to lag though. If I am in a Skype call the Skype app shows noticeable lag when scrolling through contacts. Twitter also lags when scrolling through the twitter feed but once images have loaded it is smooth. Is anyone else having similar issues?

I'm not completely satisfied with the performance either. I think the cpu is being too reserved. It uses big.little which means its 2 quad core processors rather than a true octacore. They can't work together, its either the big or little that's running things.
In normal day to day tasks it will be using the little quad core a53 1.5ghz. This is a midrange chip and doesn't even run full speed scrolling through pages etc. In some situations I've noticed better performance on my Redmi 1s.

I'm feeling it a bit laggy too. Nexus 5 with custom rom(euphoria OS) was blazing fast with "worse" CPU.

Spyrek10 said:
I'm feeling it a bit laggy too. Nexus 5 with custom rom(euphoria OS) was blazing fast with "worse" CPU.
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At least its not as bad as the z5 compact https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Om8LHKMwjU
In my opinion these big.little cpu's need to go. It puts low end cpu's to do every day tasks and the difference is noticeable. The only thing they are better at is benchmarking. My guess is chipmakers (ARM) failed this year. The best they could come up with is the a57 but it runs so hot and consumes so much power that putting it on its own was impossible. Hence the 'big.little' which would allow high benchmark scores but have most tasks run on the slower chip. Mediatek or a snapdragon 801/805 are better. I think Honor can improve things a bit in updates though.

Another weird issue is gmail crashing. For example when opening email from xda app just closes. Older versions and clearing app data didn't help.

Funny you mention the N5 as having just put Android M on it, it's flying and I was spending some time tonight playing around and wondering how it can be so quick at everything despite being so old (relatively speaking) and using very old SoC.
Doze has also made the battery much better, so while it's not as sexy as modern devices it is showing up more than just the Honor 7.
Of course, I'm using my H7 day to day and the N5 stays at home, but it's still impossible to ignore.
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

The lag doesn't really bother me since I don't use twitter on my phone much but I just found it odd since there's no lag when scrolling on YouTube wine there's a 1080p video playing. Maybe they'll fix it with updates (that will hopefully come out faster then we might expect lol)

I've faced lag in tapatalk & Google now widget consistently. This scroll stutter does come up quite frequently even in other apps
Sent from my PLK-UL00 using Tapatalk

Is anybody experience phone restart when using Google's indic keyboard?

anyone else notice how much more the play store lags after the update?

running it on condensed font, less performance?

Hey friends,
I love running the phone on condensed font so I can see more information on the screen.
I'm not sure but it feels like it slows down the phone at this mode because it needs to display more at the same time.
Trust?

Interesting been so long since the swapped but can't recall any noticeable difference in performance
Sent from my SM-G935F using XDA-Developers mobile app

I have the same feeling as the OP with my s7 edge. Anyone know if there's technical validity to this or just our imagination?

I didn't notice on my S7 edge because I've been using it in condensed mode since the beginning, but I definitely noticed a small performance degradation and choppier scrolling on my Xperia Z5 when I was running it @400dpi instead of the stock 480dpi.
I may be wrong, but I assume the fact the phone has to render more stuff to fill up the screen (more text, more pictures, more UI elements, etc.), as everything is smaller, may be the reason.

Can't really notice any difference. Our phones are powerful enough to even render 5K resolution at quite smooth speed (tried it). So performance between condensed and normal mode would be noticeable only on older devices like S3-S4.

ProtoDeVNan0 said:
Can't really notice any difference. Our phones are powerful enough to even render 5K resolution at quite smooth speed (tried it). So performance between condensed and normal mode would be noticeable only on older devices like S3-S4.
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Yeah but its not all about power. Its about how you manage power. Most of the lags,stutters occur because of juuust a tiny latency in cpu frequency scaling or switching on/off other cores of cpu. You can make a cpu jump faster and at lower load to a higher freq, but this wil increase power consumption. So I believe in theory, a phone which has more single core power but less cores (or multi core power, and yes I'm looking at you iphone 7) , will perform better on simple task and worse on harder task like 5K resolution rendering...

xantrk said:
Yeah but its not all about power. Its about how you manage power. Most of the lags,stutters occur because of juuust a tiny latency in cpu frequency scaling or switching on/off other cores of cpu. You can make a cpu jump faster and at lower load to a higher freq, but this wil increase power consumption. So I believe in theory, a phone which has more single core power but less cores (or multi core power, and yes I'm looking at you iphone 7) , will perform better on simple task and worse on harder task like 5K resolution rendering...
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Well said .

CPU Throttling - warranty?

Hello !
After long weeks of searching the answer and solution to my problem, I am exhausted. So I would like to ask the biggest Android community for help
Well, I know it's not new, but I have problem with my S7 Edge (Exynos) performance
I experience FPS drops in almost every game I play. As for games it's not that irritating, but recently I have bought Gear VR and while having this thing so close to your eyes, you see every frame skipping.
Apps for checking the CPU throttling shows that after 5-10 minutes the 4 bigger cores slow down to about 50% of their full speed. It leads to ~30% performance slow down.
I tried every solution that doesn't require root access and warranty void. For example: disabling certain packages and services (Game Launcher, Game optimization service); different settings in Game Tuner; performance mode; factory reset etc. Nothing works.
Does this kind of problems can be repaired on warranty? I know that in order to fix this you can change kernel setting, cpu governor etc but ofc they don't do that in Samsung Service Center. Is it possible for them to replace the main board and cpu with Snapdragon one?
I would not like to root my device because I didn't want to lose my 3 years warranty and I am using a lot of applications that may not work with a root.
Thank you in advance for all your replies

Did you try the game performance mode? As the "performance mode" is just screen resolution and brightness. The game mode is the real performance mode where the temps throttling is relaxed and higher clock speeds allowed(you can also edit the profile to set the resolution manually to wqhd). You can also try to set the resolution to full hd and see how it goes (tho for VR it won't be cool, but for the test it won't hurt). Also if the phone is new, it will need atleast 10 days to settle and become faster, smoother, better. Apply updates if they are pending too.
Otherwise you can't do much without root, but even then you are limited to what you can achieve so be careful + samsung have a fuse into the chip that burns out when you root the phone, it's not possible to hide the intervention and they can deny warranty for that reason (and often do so).

high_voltage said:
Did you try the game performance mode? As the "performance mode" is just screen resolution and brightness. The game mode is the real performance mode where the temps throttling is relaxed and higher clock speeds allowed(you can also edit the profile to set the resolution manually to wqhd). You can also try to set the resolution to full hd and see how it goes (tho for VR it won't be cool, but for the test it won't hurt). Also if the phone is new, it will need atleast 10 days to settle and become faster, smoother, better. Apply updates if they are pending too.
Otherwise you can't do much without root, but even then you are limited to what you can achieve so be careful + samsung have a fuse into the chip that burns out when you root the phone, it's not possible to hide the intervention and they can deny warranty for that reason (and often do so).
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Thank you for your reply
Yes, I've tried "game mode" but there is no difference. Changing resolution to Full HD helps for a while, but the Gear VR software doesn't work properly on anything other than WQHD. It just doesn't scale properly and you are unable to see whole content.
I'm just wondering whether every S7 Edge has problems like mine. I understand throttling after 20-30 minutes of intensive gameplay, but ~40% slow down after 3-5 minutes seems strange, especially because phone doesn't even get warm.

emsitek said:
Thank you for your reply
Yes, I've tried "game mode" but there is no difference. Changing resolution to Full HD helps for a while, but the Gear VR software doesn't work properly on anything other than WQHD. It just doesn't scale properly and you are unable to see whole content.
I'm just wondering whether every S7 Edge has problems like mine. I understand throttling after 20-30 minutes of intensive gameplay, but ~40% slow down after 3-5 minutes seems strange, especially because phone doesn't even get warm.
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Hard to tell, got the phone, but no vr... :/
Otherwise I don't have problems with gaming, the game mode smooths a little the already fluid gaming(but then again, the game I play mostly is vainglory and that game runs great on htc m8 that is almost 4 years old). You are talking about some more massive performance drop. Many phones start to throttle early and throttle hard, samsung is one of them for sure (they want the phone cold).
@hamdir can you lend a hand on that one? You are tons more experience with VR than me.

high_voltage said:
Hard to tell, got the phone, but no vr... :/
Otherwise I don't have problems with gaming, the game mode smooths a little the already fluid gaming(but then again, the game I play mostly is vainglory and that game runs great on htc m8 that is almost 4 years old). You are talking about some more massive performance drop. Many phones start to throttle early and throttle hard, samsung is one of them for sure (they want the phone cold).
@hamdir can you lend a hand on that one? You are tons more experience with VR than me.
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Click to collapse
Well, there is an app called CPU Throttling Test on Google Play. I would be really thankful if you give me information how your phone behave in this app. Mine throttles hard after 3-8 minutes. Clock speed of the better cores goes down to about 1.6GHz each. Sometimes even below 1.5GHz.

emsitek said:
Well, there is an app called CPU Throttling Test on Google Play. I would be really thankful if you give me information how your phone behave in this app. Mine throttles hard after 3-8 minutes. Clock speed of the better cores goes down to about 1.6GHz each. Sometimes even below 1.5GHz.
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From a cold phone, 1.9GHz almost right away(I guess the highest freq is only for burst load, like app launching) and kept for 8 minutes then drop to 1.57GHz on the big cores. So I think it's in line with your result.

high_voltage said:
From a cold phone, 1.9GHz almost right away(I guess the highest freq is only for burst load, like app launching) and kept for 8 minutes then drop to 1.57GHz on the big cores. So I think it's in line with your result.
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Yeah, that would be it. Thank you for your time. So it seems to be normal, I hope I'll get used to it somehow
I also wrote an email to Oculus, maybe they heard sth about this issue and know a fix for frames skipping.

The notorious feature known as DVFS is the likely culprit. Some forum members suggest it throttles the GPU and CPU to improve benchmark results or otherwise to protect the device. I've noticed it can lock-up and end up overheating the device but that's just an anecdote.
You can try forcing the app to run at a lower resolution which Samsung's Game Tuner does for some games, or find other solutions for unrooted devices like capping CPU frequency for a smoother experience.

nexidus said:
The notorious feature known as DVFS is the likely culprit. Some forum members suggest it throttles the GPU and CPU to improve benchmark results or otherwise to protect the device. I've noticed it can lock-up and end up overheating the device but that's just an anecdote.
You can try forcing the app to run at a lower resolution which Samsung's Game Tuner does for some games, or find other solutions for unrooted devices like capping CPU frequency for a smoother experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Almost all the phones are tweaked to use max freq only on single core load and app startup (burst). If their power management detect heavy load on all cores, it will automatically scale down to lower freq state to prevent heat building up fast. In reality in our case this is 1.87GHz for all big cores + the small ones (higher if only the big cluster is used, leaving the small cores off). The first actual thermal throttling level is 1.56-1.57GHz at around 8 minutes mark. Games would take a lot longer and in my observation as the phone is big and none will use 8 cores at the same time - there will be no throttling, just power management and stable fps. His case is different tho, VR is really a heavy one on the CPU.
As for DVFS (and extended to samsung power management, every manufacturer has it's own management) - it's there for a reason, to use your phone without major slowdowns due to heat and to be cold in touch, i.e. better for use. You can always change the behaviour via custom kernel, but you can't get more performance without heating the phone to the point of hardware throttling or uncomfortable to hold. Actually as you said - the right way if modify is to cap to lower freq and try to command the phone to keep them. This would still lead to a lot of heat, but will take some time to build up (and it will look smoother, tho with lower fps). OC is pointless for speed gains, will work only for burst loads. UV is not effective too as nowdays the SOC's are heavily binned for optimal settings from the factory.

Disable throttlinf dvfs exynos
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