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Dual-Core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011
An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer."
probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android
And who is to say that the iPhone 5 won't be dual core?
I made a comment about dual/quad core phones a while back and was laughed at. It will happen folks and sooner than you suspect. Phones are quickly becoming our primary computing device, or at least the centerpiece of our electronic lives.
It's not about playing Doom on a smart phone, it's about the phone being able to do everything we ask it to do without having to wait too long.
Remember to maintain your supply of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4
Uh...no? Maybe you're confusing its SOC nature by combining a GPU and CPU, but it is most definitely not a dual-core CPU.
Living With a Nerd
Journalism? COMPLETE misuse of the term, pocket rocket. Please retire now.
A4 is not dual core- it's an ARM Cortex A8 core with a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU. It's nearly identical to the Samsung Hummingbird CPUs used in the Galaxy S phones.
The 5th gen iPhone is rumored to have dual core, but it won't be out until at least this summer.
Sigs are for losers
"Runs smoothly" would be a selling point. "Amazing graphics" would be a selling point. "Long battery life" would be a selling point. But the number of bits of silicon inside the phone really isn't going to attract many consumers.
My Journal
I think the battery needed for my current single-core processor is big enough already.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The title suggests that all smartphones will be dual-core this year, and we know that that has not, and cannot happen.
I have come to expect a certain amount of journalistic integrity from Slashdot, better than the major news networks, and that has been thinned this morning by the headline on this article.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
If it's a core that can be turned on and off, the second core would be very useful and not kill battery life at all.
For the same reason that 2GHz is better than 1.4GHz. The number is bigger, so the PHBs and yuppies will clamour for them. Meanwhile, those of us with an eye for detail will look at things like battery capacity, sound quality, compatibility with existing architectures and applications, and make informed decisions, instead of pawing at the latest shiny-shiny like a kitten with a toy.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm sure old ones won't magically spawn a second core... :p
Remember to maintain your supply of
I think that smart phones and other handheld devices will start being used for more than just 'single consumer' purposes (if they haven't already). When you can load your presentation slideshow or video onto your "device", hook it up to a projector/display/TV and never worry about performance, stuttering or lags you'll be able to travel much lighter.
Perhaps an iPad/Galaxy/Xoom/etc can be used as a bluetooth or WiFi 'server' for shared gaming on multiple handheld devices (or something along those lines). Don't forget that PC's & phones used to be basic devices that slowly got the kitchen sink stuffed into them to keep consumers coming back for the latest & greatest. By the time these hardware manufacturers are done with the phones/handhelds we'll need another 'client' device to consume their content. It's all about "cram more in, sell more devices & create new consumer needs".
Why not? Multi-core was marketed successfully for PCs, what makes smartphones any different? Tech specs are pretty important to the Android crowd. Besides, now that certain devices will have docks that allow them become netbook and HTPC replacements, people will find uses for that extra core.
Sigs are for losers
to Android. Have any of you ever talked to an iPhone user about the possibility that another phone might even exist, let alone be a better choice than the iPhone?
The number of cores or their speed doesn't matter at the moment. For example look at Nokia. Their phones tend to have much slower CPUs, but because of better software they run just as fast as the latest & greatest from Samsung etc. I think number of cores and speed will only become a selling point once smartphones become our only computers that we just dock to our keyboard/display terminals at home.
It has to be dual core because Android renders its UI almost fully on the CPU and since even scrolling a dumb list can use nearly 100% CPU with a second core you then have some CPU power left to do other things...
And I'm not really joking here.
So Jimmy Johnson is now creating a line of Extendz-branded Android phones?
Why not? Multi-core was marketed successfully for PCs, what makes smartphones any different?
Several things:
1) Most users do not find themselves waiting for their phone to accomplish a task whereas most PC users can easily remember waiting for their PC to perform a task.
2) Almost every phone owner has found themselves running out of battery. Thus battery life is frontmost in the minds of users and Apple can easily come out with a "Double core? Double battery usage. No benefit." campaign to combat this trend.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
What are the two biggest complaints with smart-phones? Download speeds and battery life. Download speeds are not processor restricted. Battery life, however, would seem to suffer with dual core.
Smartphones need dual core to compete with pads and netbooks. However, they, being larger devices, can pack more batteries inside. What good will the fastest smartphone be if you have to recharge it every hour?
Most top smartphones right now are multitaskers, already perform more than 2 things at once even with single core processors. Having multiple cores means doing it somewhat better as you split the tasks over separate processors.
Would had been nice if the N900 had multiple cores, is just too easy to run a lot of things at once, at least, if that don't kill the battery.
Dual core with a dual battery would be nice
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If you weren't AC, I'd mod you up just for using "farknuckles".
Remember to maintain your supply of
Phones have always been dual core, at least recently. The G1, for example, had (at least) two ARM cores. The only problem was, you couldn't actually run anything on the baseband processor "for wireless security reasons" and so that calls were smooth. But it was sitting idle most of the time. If anyone hacked the radio image they could probably have produced dual-core capability.
The DS has two processors but is not dual core.
Exactly. the iPhone sells because it provides such an amazingly refined experience. I have yet to meet an android phone that delivers the same experience. Many of them are very nice but when the open source projects like Cyanogen provide a better phone and environment that the manufacturer there is a very large and glaring problem with the android handsets.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
1) The same argument was made before dual core made it to consumer PCs. If you build it, they will come.
:)
In any case, waiting on either PC or phone is usually due to some IO task, not heavy CPU usage. By far, the most waiting I'm going to be doing is when web pages are being loaded.
Media playback and games are primarily where users will see the most benefit from dual-core in the foreseeable future. Having a heavy webpage with Flash running smoothly doesn't hurt either.
2) Today, chips have very good power-gating. If only one core is being used, only one core is being powered. Also, the power usage increase is logarithmic. For this reason, having a second core doesn't double the TDP of the entire chip.
Also, most of these dual-core chips add a fraction of die space in return for an extra core. The SOCs already only dedicate a minority of space to the ARM core- the rest is taken up by the GPU, Memory, radio, and other misc controllers.
And due to die shrinkages with every generation, many dual-core chips will be drawing less power than their single-core counterparts. Case in point: the 3rd generation Snapdragon with dual-Scorpion cores is claimed (at least by Qualcomm) to use less power than the Snapdragons in current smartphones. Going from 65nm to 45nm (28nm expected by end of 2011!) provides that kind of headroom.
Besides, the biggest user of battery space is usually the screen, then radio (wifi, 3G/4G, bluetooth, etc), then the CPU at a distant third.
Double core- Double battery usage? Right, whatever.
Sigs are for losers
Is going to sneak into my house and install the new CPU? I guess that's cool, but kind of creepy.
Yes they will!
You click your heels together while chanting..... There's no CEO like jobs.... There's no CEO like Jobs.....
And Poof! a second core grows inside your old phone! It's a Apple Miracle!
What? Why cant I have a reality distortion bubble of my own? Stop poking me you penguins!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
omap4, and all new dual core phones are based on the arm9.. aka cortexa9..
I wouldn't say its more powerfull than an atom (of 2011) but they are sure damn close for a fraction of the energy useage
Cyanogenmod does provide a very nice experience. It's what I use. LauncherPro Plus also helps a lot.
But you and I have different definitions of "refined". Just the pull down bar on Android makes it a much more refined experience than iOS for me. Based upon my workflow, having that is a better experience where on an iPhone I was always furiously swiping, clicking, etc. to hop between apps, get back to what I was doing, and so on. When I switched it was like night and day, for me at least. Android's workflow just seemed more refined to me.
The DS is dual core. Not everything on it uses both but many things do.
The second core on the DS handles audio playback, wireless, the touch screen, and nothing else. Nintendo writes all the code for the second core "for security reasons". It's comparable to the baseband processor on smartphones: a less powerful core than the application processor dedicated to radio communication, on which execution is more locked down.
Absolutely incorrect. On Android if you have your processor pegged with a game, browsing the web, etc, and a call comes in, there's typically some lag time while the phone switches tasks to bring up the image of the caller and allow the answer. That and all the email/im/sms push/pull that goes on constantly, live wallpaper, multi-cores become a godsend. I can't tell you how many times I have to deal with this on my phone.
The iPhone gets away with more consistent response by limiting the multitasking and incorporates strict process prioritization, and that's also how they accomodate a slower processor (foreground process gets all the CPU) which helps increase battery life. It's ingenious, but limiting. They have no such thing as live wallpaper, and that's on purpose. Android is a full multi-tasking operating system, and that's why multiple cores benefit it more at this point. When iPhone goes multi-core they will start lifting the multitasking restrictions in iOS and catch-up to Android, and this will no longer be a differentiator between the two.
Of all the things that I wanted my Droid to do that it couldn't, dual-core multitasking wasn't one of them.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I think different people define "good experience" differently. For the general crowd here on /., I'd expect "good experience" to mean "I can tinker with it," or "it's FLOSS," etc. And that's fine. People need to buy the devices that will give them the experience that they want.
Hell, a member of my family recently switched from his iPhone to a BlackBerry Torch. He likes it better. Personally I'm no longer a big fan of BlackBerry, but to each is own.
(Disclaimer: I use an iPhone and believe it gives me a "good experience" - but I'm not married to it).
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
But the number of bits of silicon inside the phone really isn't going to attract many consumers.
Two processors for the same price as one ?
Why are you capitalizing phone? Is there some acronym that I should know about.
Your phone may have been designed for mobile communications, but that isn't how people are using them. It turns out, people like having a computer in their pocket that can also make phone calls. People are texting, using Facebook, playing games, and Binging more than talking. If the phone can make it through the day on a single charge (and for most people, the current generation of phones can do this), then why not consider adding more cores. I think it becomes especially interesting if the second core is different from the first. It could end up saving power by doing in hardware what was previously done in software (think GPU's and 3d graphics).
^This, a thousand times this. Any potential benefits (from a hardware or software perspective) that I could gain by switching to an iPhone would be instantly wiped out by the loss of the pull-down notification bar.
That one feature alone instantly makes Android a better choice...IMO, of course.
Living With a Nerd
now that is awesome, thanks for the heads-up.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html
No kidding. When I ran across this the old Steam song started running though my head...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaG2Acg8n60
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
That's your opinion and you are entitled to that. I've been disillusioned with the megapixel hype and I'm not sure I agree with you.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
probably because most of the SoCs come with telephony chipsets baked in.
Then how does Apple make money selling its iPod touch 4 for half the price of an unactivated smartphone, when it's mostly the same hardware as iPhone 4? It appears to be a case of pick two:
Most of Atom's advantage has to do with its relatively enormous memory bandwidth compared to mobile SoC's. When looking at DMIPS/MHz of relatively cache-bound tasks (Dhrystone, for instance), Atom's clock-for-clock performance is about the same as a Cortex A8.
Atom, when used in a netbook, can of course afford to use high-power memory modules as well as high-powered multi-channel memory interfaces. Most dual-core SoC's announced (except OMAP4) use single-channel, 32-bit, LP-DDR2.
how long before we have distributed computing on phones? dynamically initiated as users subscribe to problems of interest, or link a bunch of phones via wifi to do real time image processing? would be nice for the military out in the field...providing soldiers with a way to do some heavy data analysis with minimal overhead. and why waste all these increasingly powerful CPU/GPUs sitting dormant in our phones at night?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
my old nokia n96 had dual arm9 cores, sure it were probably two seperate chips instead of 1 die, but the principle is the same
still, it absolutely SUCKED ASS compared to any phone of the day, i junked it and went back to my nokia 6120 classic, single cpu phone, which just worked way better (both symbian s60 phones by the way)
As all smartphones out today prove, you dont need two cpu cores to be a good phone
People, what a bunch of bastards
It makes perfect sense. When docked AND plugged in, the cores can be turbo boosted with a doubling of the Ghz. Bam, double the speed, fast enough to compete with a budget laptop.
When it's unplugged, the cores are underclocked again, and battery life is good.
Of course, such phones would be expensive and the dock will eat up some mainboard/battery space.
But we would need a universal dock to make such devices convenient enough. If there are terminals everywhere for you to plug your cellphone into, your cell will become your backup laptop.
All Android phones released in 2010 were capped at 1Ghz with chips from either Qualcomm or Samsung. The Samsung Infuse 4G is the first phone I'm aware of that at stock is greater than 1Ghz (it is 1.2Ghz).
Almost all the Motorola Android phones, and all the high-end ones currently shipping, use TI OMAP processors.
First, Droid (Milestone) in 2009 used a TI OMAP 3430
Later, Droid X in 2010 used a TI OMAP 3630 at 1Ghz
Finally, Droid 2 Global Launched on Nov 9 2001 with a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP processor
I think the Sony POS bit on The Onion from a couple years ago just about sums it up. Consumers are lemmings and will buy any stupid piece of crap as long as it's got more bells and whistles than the stupid piece of crap that came before it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Or are you saying you have the first dual core smartphone from 2011? :-)
I'm desperate to know when they will invent a pocket sized smart device capable of impersonating a phone. Oh wait they had that? And they are uninviting them? So they are still replacing phone functionality, signal reception and call reliability with more flashy shit I don't need?
What's that? You can now get a pretty good tricorder app? Damn I genuinely take it all back now.
I have an Eris and love it after I got rid of the factory software which is basically my point.
I never really thought about how awesome the pull down bar is though. I'm just speaking from the perspective of someone who has watched people go both ways between the iPhone and Android gardens.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Given that karma is composed of alkanes, it burns very well.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Which is that 99/100 iPhone users don't know the clock rate of their phone. They buy it specifically for "battery capacity", "sound quality", and "compatibility with existing architectures and applications" and a host of other usability criteria.
Unless your point was to say that iPhone users are making rational decisions about their phones and that Android-humping tech junkies are the ones obsessed with useless metrics.
Yeah, while the Android phones feel slow and clunky, and the Apple ones have a buttery smooth GUI, I guess the evidence is right in my face.
Maybe if Android ditched their crappy Java knockoff they'd have a product people would line up for.
Then buy a Jitterbug. I mean, you don't need bluetooth, you don't need games, you don't need a calendar, you don't need internet access, you don't need an alarm.
I personally want the high end phone that can do more than my computer did 10 years ago, and two cores with the potential to disable one is the obvious way to go for that goal of increased mobile computing power - which is the entire point of this conversation.
Oh. NM. You already did. :)
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You're right, I was referring to the A8 core within the two SOCs. However, they both use the same PowerVR SGX 535 and were designed by the same firm (Intrinsity, which was acquired by Apple last year) in collaboration with Samsung. The A4 is slightly smaller, owing its decreased die size to smaller cache and other tweaks. Functionally, they're very similar, much moreso than any other A8-based SOC (TI OMAP, Qualcomm Snapdragon, etc).
Sigs are for losers
or the battery capacity vs draw, or the sound quality or the compatibility with existing standards.
Iphone buyers purchase an Iphone because the marketing tells them it's the bestest thing evar and it will make them cool and sexy and hip.
Unless your point was that Android users are the ones making rational decisions while Iphone users are obsessed with buying something that they can show off to gain some kind of status.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Let's say atom-based device vs arm-based devices. But i'm pretty sure the author meant CPU's as "devices based on CPU x" ;-)
Doesn't make ARM's any less impressive. I'm pretty much fan of the OMAP4 actually -
Please teach me something. What is wrong with the iPhone's battery capacity or sound quality or compatibility with existing standards?
Or did your mom already put you to bed for the night?
Have fun running SETI@home on your Droid, loser.
The iPad is a tablet computer designed, developed and marketed by Apple primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content.Now a days it is available at online shopping sites. One should use it.