T&K Online Store Blog Cortex A9 is not "obsolete"
http://blog.t-kstore.com/cortex-a9-is-not-obsolete/
Cortex A9 is not "obsolete"
A lot of people mistakenly believe that Cortex A9 is “obsolete” and wondering why does companies like Action-Semiconductors and Rockchips are still choosing it for their new products such as the dual/quad core CPUs from Actions-semiconductors & Dual Core 28nm RK3168 & quad core 28nm RK3188 while MediaTeK & AllWinners are choosing the “newer” Cortex A7.
In fact, Cortex A9 is not obsolete and although Cortex A7 is newer, The CPU performance of A9 is higher than A7.
Let’s compare the Quad Core Cortex A7 AllWinner A31 benchmark score with Dual Core Cortex A9 RK3066:
AllWinnerTech A31 Quad Core Cortex A7:
Rockchip RK3066 Dual Core:
As you may see, The RK3066 which is a dual core Cortex A9 receive around the same CPU score as the AllWinner A31 which is quad core cortex A7.
While the Quad Core Cortex A9 RK3188 receive more than 18005.
Some people are saying that Cortex A7 consume less power than Cortex A9.
This is not exactly right because Rockchip works quite hard to reduce the power consumption without hurting the performance.
For example the recently introduced Dual Core Cortex A9 RK3168 which is built using the most energy-efficient HKMG 28nm process consume around 1 watt of power while decoding 1080p video.
Which mean a 3100mah battery would be enough for around 10 hours
Most tablets are now coming with not less than 6000mah battery while some are even with 10000mah.
The gaming performance on the dual core Rockchip RK3066 & RK3168 which is a Cortex A9 under the resolution of 1280*800 & 1GB DDR3 RAM proved to be great. Most HD games worked.
Including Real Racing 3/Asphalt7/Death Trigger/NFS. In fact, Most of them even worked fine when te tablet was connected to a TV using HDMI mirroring output.
The Rockchip RK3188 quad core Cortex A9 with 2GB DDR3 RAM can run the games without problems even at a resolution of 1920*1200/2048*1536.
In fact, Same thing goes for AllWinner A31. All the heavy games are working as good as on Rockchip CPUs.
So basically there is no difference in the gaming performance just like the performance of the video decoding/web browsing/heavy multitasking. There is no difference in power consumption. Both can handle Adobe Flash Player/HTML5 even with a lot of tabs and a lot of applications in background. So to conclude, Cortex A9 can still do everything Cortex A7 can and there is no much difference in neither performance nor power consumption.
