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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?
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.
Google is trying to eliminate the fragmentation that everyone is complaining about, and also trying to reduce the crappy tablets out there giving Android a bad name.
By setting the minimum bar for Honeycomb at a dual-core A9 they can guarantee a certain experience and consistency for all the apps. They can probably also move to hardware acceleration for composite effects, which they can't do for all the Android cell phone hardware out there.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.