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Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor
adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."
So Google are going to leave their shiny new baby on gingerbread? Yeah... no.
And wasn't it an equally "reliable" source within an OEM that told us about minimum hardware requirements for Gingerbread? What ever happened with that again?
Oh yeah, it was total bull.
Why REQUIRE [a sufficiently fast CPU]?
So that people don't blame Google for the molasses performance of a bargain-basement Android device.
If an OS can to take advantage of dual processors it's a good thing.
If an OS needs a dual processor to function properly it's a bad thing.
Pretty much everything that is called through Java bindings shows up in profiles. One wonders what is the purpose of that language? Why is such a slow platform enforced in Android-OS in the first place ? You know the low-power, low-performance mobile platform. Smart operating systems sure can run without Java, see iOS or Bada. And then there is the dreaded "automatic garbage collector" that is always kicking in and stalls the entire system when you least need it -- no wonder Google needs another core to tame such a lousy system.
No one (well, almost no one) seems to mind when a mobile OS requires a faster processor, but the number of cores is suddenly an issue. Wake up and smell the 21st century. The not-so-recent improvements in performance come from the number of cores and not the clock speed. And it looks like this is the way it's going to be for a while. Get used to it.