Kernel for Overclocking and Core Count control - Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I've switched from those S7 and Note 5 ports which lagged and had big delays opening apps to JDC OptimizedCM13 ROM which has basically no lag whatsoever. I read around that the kernel is what controls the CPU but the one I'm using (default one with the ROM, alucard kernel) doesn't support over clocking. What I'm trying to do is disabled core 3 and 4 to make a dual core processor but over clock the first two. With PC gaming people have always recommended fewer faster cores rather than more slower cores. Same with the Apple iPhones, it makes sense that fewer very fast cores would make the UI much smoother and from benchmarks it looks like Android doesn't use that many cores too often. I'm not doing any gaming, just light tasks only so I'm trying to save a little bit of battery but also make my phone smoother.
My specs are i9505 with Optimized CM13 ROM, default Alucard kernel. Using the TWRP 3 recovery (the ROM thread recommended it).
TL;DR a kernel for i9505 MM that allows over clocking and disabling cores.

There are none such kernels available for marshmallow.
And you reasoning isn't quite right.
It may be true that sometimes fewer, more powerful cores, might be better, but this is mainly due to the fact that the app, or program, wasn't made with multi-core devices in mind, and as such, doesn't benefit from a multi-core structure.
Another thing is that a few hundred MHz won't make a huge difference. Especially since you won't be able to go high enough due to the processor becoming unstable.
The highest I could ever go was 2.1 GHz, but even this wasn't stable. After about 1 day it would freeze.
Remember, phones and ROMs are required to meet certain battery life requirements. As such, they usually come with a balanced configuration.

Related

2nd Core App Questions

so now that the latest beta of siyah kernel supports enabling/disabling of the 2nd core, and tegrak already released an app for it, i just want to know the possible effects in performance/battery if you use the different options of the 2nd core app.. especially when we use the single core option.. so what will happen to our phone when we run HD games, and im sure that it will extend the battery life, just not sure how the phone will behave with only 1 core running.. and will it be bad for our phone to only run at a single core..
and also, am i right to assume that our phone has the option "dynamic hotplug" by default?
Shouldn't see much of a decrease in the performance. The sgs has a single core yet the cpu can still handle anything thrown against it. Point being there is nothing out that demands dual core performance. On another note note, hd games are not actually gd. It is just advertising point for game developers.
$1 gets you a reply
Using one core instead won't break your cpu. It gonna make your phone cooler ( ! core is running producing less heat and the heat dissipator is made for the dual core ) and have a better battery life obviously. It will, obviously too, slow down your phone, but the speed lost is to be determined. You might want to test it out to see if it's getting laggy or simply suck. As already said, the SGS I has a 1Ghz proc and can handle most of the top recent content available so with a 1.2 Ghz single core, you should be able to handle everything available, specially with an optimized kernel like siyah. And you are right, the default mode is dynamic hotplug, which use both core when needed and turn the core 1 ( 2nd core ) off when not needed.
I tried playing a little with it. The overall smootness doesn't change and i get about the same fps in nenamark2. The only game i saw stuttering a little more in single mode was Shadowgun, the others are just the same. I also have the feeling that cpu noise is reduced while playing music through headsets when you run on single.
I like the idea of switching off one core. But while using only one core this leads to a higher load on that corse. This will result in higher frequencies an thus higher battery consumption?
So might using only one core even be worse for battery life?
I mean isn't that the reason why you use multiple cores? That one does not have to produce cpu with high frequencies? I think I once read that the energy a cpu uses it proportional to the frequency squared. So it is not a linear relation. That means two cores on 500 MHz are using less power than one cpu on 1000 Mhz. Can someone confirm that? So if th os is optimized for multiple cores the energy consumptions will be less.
What do you think or know about Android. Is it managing two cores intelligently an thus reducing energy consumption or are we doing better with switching off one core?
Hi,
is anybody out there who can share any experiences with this 2nd Core app?
It would be very interesting whether it really saves battery(and if yes, is it noticeably or is it a huge difference)? Are there any negative effects in speed oder stability?
Rgds
I don't particularly care about potential battery saving, but I use it to manually disable one core while playing games which have problems with SoundPool ( see http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17623 ), such as Galcon, as this mitigates the problems.
Schindler33 said:
I like the idea of switching off one core. But while using only one core this leads to a higher load on that corse. This will result in higher frequencies an thus higher battery consumption?
So might using only one core even be worse for battery life?
I mean isn't that the reason why you use multiple cores? That one does not have to produce cpu with high frequencies? I think I once read that the energy a cpu uses it proportional to the frequency squared. So it is not a linear relation. That means two cores on 500 MHz are using less power than one cpu on 1000 Mhz. Can someone confirm that? So if th os is optimized for multiple cores the energy consumptions will be less.
What do you think or know about Android. Is it managing two cores intelligently an thus reducing energy consumption or are we doing better with switching off one core?
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totlly agree

Dualcore processor processing

Hi,
I was wondering if the 2 CPU's are working simultaneously together? or I'st just 1?., I'm using FLEXREAPER X10 ICS 4.0.3 . Sometimes I get screen glitches .... when My tab is trying to sleep and I touched the screen. Also...when I try the benchmark it only say's the CPU1 processing speed... & etc. Also when I'm browsing in the Playstore the screen animation is a bit lag... Can some1 enlighten me...or is there an app for this? than can force 2 cpu to work all the time together.?
Yes, both cores are enabled at all times. But no, you cannot make an application use both cores unless the application was designed to do so.
FLEXREAPER X10 ICS 4.0.3 base a leak rom ICS, not a stable rom, so it has some problems.
Your benchmark is correct.
There are NOT 2 CPU's. There is only one CPU, with 2 cores. It doesn't process two applications at once, it CAN process two threads of the same application at the same time. Think of it as this: two CPUs would be two people writing on different pieces of paper.A single CPU with two cores would be one person writing with both hands at the same time. He can only write on the same piece of paper, but it's faster then it would be if he was writing with only one hand.
Note: this is not related to multi-task. Multi-tasking works based on processing a little bit of each app at a time, so altough it may seen that both are running at the same time, it is not.
Most apps are not designed to work with threads though, so there's your (actually, our) problem. But this is not an A500 problem, it applies to any multi-core processor based devices ou there (including desktops).
danc135 said:
There are NOT 2 CPU's. There is only one CPU, with 2 cores
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Essentially true, but...
It doesn't process two applications at once
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False. Two cores is just two CPUs on the same die.
Thanks for the response guys... I'm getting bit confused with this "multi-core processor".... I was expecting that it is fast to no lag, during browsing apps in my lib,switching application, even browsing in The PlAYSTORE". So It's correct to say that multi-core processor is a bit of a waste if an app can't use it's full/all cores potential? Also if the UI of an OS can't use all cores at the same time?
Dual Core, Dual CPU....
Not entirely, because if the kernel is capable of multi-threading, then it can use one core to run services while another is running the main application. The UI is only another application running on top of the kernel...
The only difference between a dual core Intel cpu and a dual core tegra 2 is the instruction set and basic capabilities, otherwise they can be thought of as essentially the same animal. The kernel, which is the core of the OS, handles the multi-tasking, but android has limited multi-tasking capabilities for Applications. Even so, services that run in the background are less of a hindrance on a dual core cpu than a single core one, and more and more applications are being written to take advantage of multiple cores.
Just have a bunch of widgets running on your UI, and you are looking at multi-tasking and multi-threading. Which are both better on multi-core processors.
A multiple core cpu are not more then one processor stacked on one die. They thread and load balance thru software.Applications MUST BE AWARE Of multi core cpus to take advantage of the dual cores.
A multiple Processor computer has a 3rd processor chip on the main board. this chip balances the load on hardware. this does not add over head on the processors. as on a Dual multi CORE CHIP. has a much higher load overhead.
SO Many people confuse the two. This is due to how the companies market the muticore cpu devices .
So a application that can not thread itself on a multi core chip will run in one of the cpu cores. a threaded app can well guess?
a dual Processor computer can run non multi thread aware app or program on two cores..
Its quite simply complicated..
You can throw all the hardware you want at a system. In the end, if the software sucks (not multi-threaded, poorly optimized, bad at resource management, etc...), it's still going to perform bad.
Dual core doesn't mean it can run one applicaton at twice speed, it means that it can run two applications at full speed, given that they're not threaded. Android's largely meant to run one application foregrounded, and since they can't magically make every application multi-threaded, you won't be seeing the benefits of multiple cores as much as you will on a more traditional platform.
Also, a dual-core tegra 2 is good, but only in comparison to other ARM processors (and even then, it's starting to show its age.) It's going to perform poorly compared to a full x86 computer, even one that's older.
netham45 said:
You can throw all the hardware you want at a system. In the end, if the software sucks (not multi-threaded, poorly optimized, bad at resource management, etc...), it's still going to perform bad.
Dual core doesn't mean it can run one applicaton at twice speed, it means that it can run two applications at full speed, given that they're not threaded. Android's largely meant to run one application foregrounded, and since they can't magically make every application multi-threaded, you won't be seeing the benefits of multiple cores as much as you will on a more traditional platform.
Also, a dual-core tegra 2 is good, but only in comparison to other ARM processors (and even then, it's starting to show its age.) It's going to perform poorly compared to a full x86 computer, even one that's older.
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This is so true . With the exception of a TRUE Server dual OR Quad processor computer.. There is a special on board chip that will thread application calls to balance the load for non threaded programs and games..My first dual processor computer was a amd MP3000 back when dual cpu computers started to be within user price ranges. Most applications/programs did not multi thread .
And yes as far as computer speed and performance you will not gain any from this. but only will feel less lag when running several programs at once.a 2.8 ghz dual processor computer still runs at 2.8 not double that.
erica_renee said:
With the exception of a TRUE Server dual OR Quad processor computer.. There is a special on board chip that will thread application calls to balance the load for non threaded programs and games..
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Actually this is incorrect. All such decisions are left to the OS's own scheduler, for multiple reasons: the CPU cannot know what kind of tasks it is to run, what should be given priority under which conditions and so on, like e.g. on a desktop PC interactive, user-oriented and in-focus applications and tasks are usually given more priority than background-tasks, whereas on a server one either gives all tasks similar priority or handles tasks priorities based on task-grouping. Not to mention realtime operating system which have entirely different requirements altogether.
If it was left to the CPU the performance gains would be terribly limited and could not be adjusted for different kinds of tasks and even operating systems.
(Not that anyone cares, I just thought to pop in and rant a little...)
Self correction
I said a multi-core processor only runs threads from the same process. That is wrong (thanks to my Computer Architecture professor for misleading me). It can run multiple threads from different processes, which would constitute true parallel processing. It's just better to stick with same process threads because of shared memory within the processor. Every core has its own cache memory (level 1 caches), and shared, on-die level 2 caches.
It all depends on the OS scheduler, really.
With ICS (and future Android versions), I hope the scheduler will improve to get the best of multi-core.
In the end though, it won't matter if applications aren't multi-thread (much harder to code). What I mean is, performance will be better, but not as better as it could be if developers used a lot of multi-threading.
To answer hatyrei's question, yes, it is a waste, in the sense that it has too much untapped potential.

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.

My new SM-P900 lags a lot!

Hi, I'm new in this forum. I need help. I bought a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 (SM-P900). I know it has two quadcores (one of 1.9 GHz and another of 1.3 GHz) but I think it only use one of them, because it lags a lot when I run games and another apps like chrome. Also when I run benchmarks, they only recognize the 1.9 GHz one. I tested Asphalt 8 and it runs at 20 fps or less. Also it lags when I pass pages in S Note. There's a way to speed up and take advantage of both CPUs? Thanks!
S Note always seems to lag (I don't use it, but others report it.) The app isn't optimized for 12.2". Try Lecture Notes.
Benchmarks see only one CPU because that's their limitation. They couldn't detect the second one even of it was running laps around the first.
Cores don't stack. So even if you have 4 1.9Ghz cores, it doesn't become 7.6Ghz. This is why the amount of Ghz matters so much for gaming and heavy apps. The Exynos is designed for multitasking, not heavy processing(games). That's what Snapdragon is for.
Next is the Mali GPU. It's weaker than the Adreno and doesn't handle 2K very well. Particularly in heavy games. Oh it does Candy Crush just fine , but it's like Intel HD vs Nvidia in terms of the more serious work.
If gaming was a priority, you should've gone for the P905 with the Snapdragon 800 & Adreno GPU.
You can try to get rid of most of the bloatware, that should at least speed it up a bit. Also replace the launcher with Nova or Apex, they use less system resources. (60MB RAM vs 800MB.) You can also try a factory reset, see if that helps.
Maybe someone else with a p900 can tell us if they, too, have the same framerate issue. (I've got the P905.)
The Note 3 N9005 and N900 editions have the same hardware as the P905 and P900 respectively. The N900 with the same Exynos/Mali has the same issues with lag in Gaming as the P900 does.
S Note can't be helped, that's Samsung's fault, bad coding.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk 2
Root it and pick one of the stock based roms because they are the only ones with kernel development. I'm on CM 11 because I love aosp but I'm living with the built in kernel. That's the best you're going to get as far as I can see, but there are a lot of really smart folks around here.
Thanks for replying. Your answers helped me
Asphalt 8 has graphics settings where you can change the level of detail. Change the settings to low (which still looks good) and play is completely smooth.
Regarding optimizing general performance, I'd stick with Samsung stock roms as the gpu driver is better than cm based roms. Change the kernel and overclock the cpu and gpu to 2GHz and 667MHz respectively. Use the synapse app to undervolt the cpu and gpu at the highest frequency steps, necessary to avoid thermal limits which drops the clock speeds. With these settings I get 41000 on Antutu and 996/3000+ on Geekbench 3. Very smooth performance for my tablet.
hi guys new to the forum hope you can help..im about to buy the wifi version but because of the lag im tempted with the lte now..my question is a do a lot of art work .sketching etc and recently artrage was released for android..would you say the snapdragon would be better than the exynos version for brush lag etc .I cant seem to get a good answer to this question ..the note 12.2 is a great size and much lighter than a laptop and reat battery life..
sorry wrong forum

Big Core are "stopped"

hi
i am new but i cant find a way for see the firtst 1,5 ghz cores work....all cpu app i can find see me only work the last 4 core with 1,2 ghz...
please help me unlock the firt 4 core are everytime stopped thnx for help
Those kick in only when you are doing something "hard" in that time. Like benchmarking in background.
SoNic67 said:
Those kick in only when you are doing something "hard" in that time. Like benchmarking in background.
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i try run all test and i dont see one time the big core work, they are stopped every time...( try pc mark but dont work he crash after 4k encoding video) with kernel auiditior i can active all 8 core...now they work everytime and i can set governor for each processor...
but other app like cpuz dont find the first processor they see only the last 4 core... ok maybe with bench i can see all cores work but is very hard find a way for check the correct work for governor and the phone processor work fine....
if u dont have root cpu app dont find any governor...or see only one processor...
Those are limitations of the apps themselves or your OS.
I have the official N (rooted with ElementalX) and CPU-Z sees all the cores.
Also there are never supposed to work all 8 in the same time, only a group/cluster of 4 at one time, it is not a straight-up 8 core CPU. They are not "equal" in respect of performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE
Different combinations of Governors and Schedulers produce different results.
PS: The newer Snapdragon 625, that is present in G5 Plus, is listed as a true 8 core: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/625
The 617 is a big.LITTLE octa-core, not a true 8-core CPU such as the 625, like @SoNic67 said. The 617 has one cluster running up to 1.5-1.6 GHz (depending on the kernel), and one cluster that generally runs from 500 MHz-1200 MHz.
The little cluster, or the 500-1200 MHz cluster, is fine for basic tasks, such as UI, scrolling, etc. However, in games, all cores will online (or at least that's the point). Some apps are not threaded for 8 cores and thus will not utilize, or need, 8 cores.
Also, in reality, the 4 "big" cores make very little difference in terms of performance. I did 2 benches in another thread, where Antutu came up 40K with 4 cores and 45k with 8 cores. Although this seems like a large performance decrease, without the big cores the phone was cool, still ran quick, and drained far less battery.
Finally, having 8 cores also can introduce performance deficits as well, especially if your hotplug is inefficient (there may be delays in turning on cores, resulting in UI jank). I thus recommend simply leaving them off- better battery, cooling, and still decent performance.
thx for support and continue OS is amazing gw.
negusp said:
The 617 is a big.LITTLE octa-core, not a true 8-core CPU such as the 625, like @SoNic67 said. The 617 has one cluster running up to 1.5-1.6 GHz (depending on the kernel), and one cluster that generally runs from 500 MHz-1200 MHz.
The little cluster, or the 500-1200 MHz cluster, is fine for basic tasks, such as UI, scrolling, etc. However, in games, all cores will online (or at least that's the point). Some apps are not threaded for 8 cores and thus will not utilize, or need, 8 cores.
Also, in reality, the 4 "big" cores make very little difference in terms of performance. I did 2 benches in another thread, where Antutu came up 40K with 4 cores and 45k with 8 cores. Although this seems like a large performance decrease, without the big cores the phone was cool, still ran quick, and drained far less battery.
Finally, having 8 cores also can introduce performance deficits as well, especially if your hotplug is inefficient (there may be delays in turning on cores, resulting in UI jank). I thus recommend simply leaving them off- better battery, cooling, and still decent performance.
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