Co Processors.

Many things co exist. Religions, countries, neighbors and of course phone manufacturers.

Ok of course phone manufacturers co exist, you can’t walk into a store and ONLY see iPhones. Because if you’re in the Apple store you’ll also see Macbooks and iMacs. But that’s not your only option. Your phone carrier carries Nokia, Alcatel, ZTE, Samsung and Apple (probably). The playing field for all these phone manufacturers is pricing. As a common rule, the more you pay the more you get and better the more the things are. Try saying that thrice over.

iPhone 8. A very powerful phone. A six core CPU 4 efficiency cores. 4 lower power cores focused on smaller tasks. I see it as a 2 core CPU with 4 cores of Co processing.

There are a number of CPUs from many years ago that are powerful still. The i7 2700k for example. Not all these CPUs can handle everything, but if given help for the dozens and dozens of small tasks that windows puts on, it would probably be able to. If you had low power, 1 core processors to take on bundles of tasks like the Macbook Pro and iMac Pro do, such as speakers, webcam, microphone and touch bar (in the case of the MBP) stuff like that might not be a big task but the drivers for such could potentially take some power from the CPU in order to be done. How I imagine Co-Processors being used is rather to tackle tasks that take up less than 5% of CPU power. Right now, running Steam, Opera and Chrome on a Phenom II X4, I am hovering around 15–20% CPU usage. (dropping well below 10 when I am not typing). It seems stuff like USB inputting can take up quite a bit of CPU power especially on an older CPU. I just spazzed my mouse around for 5 seconds and it got up to 65+%. Using co processors to handle inputs, drivers and other smaller tasks could be incredibly useful.

Xeon Phi is a great approach to processing. Typically Xeon Phi CPUs have lower clock speeds, and are aimed towards more productivity based workloads. 3D rendering, Video editing and rendering, etc. Typically traditional Xeons are just about even with an I7 in gaming, meanwhile Xeon Phi stands no chance against an I7 in such a workload. Here is something to consider though, the Intel Xeon Phi 7210P is a PCIe based CPU with it’s own RAM. Though 64 cores and 16 GB RAM is a bit overkill for a co processor which would handle small tasks.

The reason I bring up Xeon Phi is the PCIe based device. Using a similiar approach to help older CPUs could be cheaper and much more efficient than buying or building a completely new PC for many people. In some cases it could be inefficient, such as where a low end co-processor is more powerful than a full CPU, which could happen with just about any PC older than 2011 or 2012.

In the last article I was talking about ARM architecture CPUs. Apple used their T1 and T2 in the Macbook Pro and iMac Pro to handle stuff like speakers, microphone and webcam. Those, as far as I know are based on an ARM architecture. Using ARM cpus as co-processors would be more efficient to handle small tasks due to the small cost per core.