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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."
Honeycomb's big, yeah yeah yeah, it's not small, no no no?
Teach your kids: "C++ made baby Jesus cry."
How many cores will Total require? Probably just 1 right?
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.
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.
This is already been discussed at length on androidcentral. The consensus is that this stupid rumor is false. It makes absolutely no sense to require any particular number of cores to run Android.
Who is writing this stuff and what is their motive???
Sorry, but you need to update your arguments.
Java is NOT slow and hasn't been for quite some time - that argument is so old it's not worth discussing anymore.
Most benchmarks put it ahead of other languages (with the exception of C and C++ to a lesser extent).
In terms of performance it's well ahead of Objective-C due to the overhead of it's dynamic dispatching (oh, and Objective-C 2 now has GC as well - it's about time).
http://www.javarants.com/2010/05/26/android-dalvik-vm-performance-is-a-threat-to-the-iphone/
The current crop of 1Ghz Android phones are every bit as fast and responsive as the iPhone4 (with it's 1Gz A4 CPU - essentially a custom Cortex-A8) so your fanbois argument just doesn't pass the smell test. Rumors are that the iPad2 and iPhone5 will ship with dual-code A4 cpus (based on the Cortex-A9), so if iOS and Objective-C are so much more efficient why does it need dual-core? It's needs it to compete against the flood of dual-core devices that will be coming in 2011 and it will need the horsepower to stave off the attack from Android which IMHO, has already surpased the iPhone in terms of features as well as usability (and I'm an iPhone user - for now).
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Java might be fast enough for your fancy calendar app, but seriously, we need to access NEON the SIMD ARM extensions directly on the CPU to get some decent speed, because the hardware itself is still slow even the A8 Cortex is far underpowered, and do not want to wait hundreds of cycles for Java binding to even start. Java is a nightmare to code mission critical real-time applications and professional grade games. Java should be optional, nobody serious would even consider it then. GC and "managed code" was Sun's marketing ploy to deceive those exec fools to believe that Java is somewhat better then anything else, it looks like many still drink the Sun stirred Java coolaid here.
Objective-C is in the same slow lane league as Java, it is intended for weekend code warriors and calendar app coders. Our iPhone apps, surprise, do not use ObjC at all (except for some tiny binding code snippets).
Heh, I use my tab as a phone everyday. And hold it right up to my ear like, "What?". I just run skype and google voice and away I go. The speaker at the bottom turned down is no louder than a phone earpiece and the mic is conveniently located right on the side. All this for 20 bucks a month for data and ~5 for skype number. And it makes a great machine to make posts on Slashdot talking about it to boot!
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.