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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."
two cores on lower clock rate may consume less energy than one core with fast clocking. energy use is proportional to the square of the clock rate, so it's a matter of tuning to achieve lower power. the only question is whether the slow cores will be fast enough for the important sequential tasks (if there are such at all).
Umm... the Android G1 had a 524Mhz Qualcomm processor and that was 2008. The first Android phone to come out with a 1Ghz Snapdragon was the Nexus One, and that wasn't until January 2010. And as far as current-gen Android phones having a 1.2Ghz processor, none of those have been released yet. 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).
As for battery life, I'd like to direct you to this white paper: http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_papers/Benefits-of-Multi-core-CPUs-in-Mobile-Devices_Ver1.2.pdf
Sure it's written by nVidia, but I doubt they are allowed to flat out lie, as that's some pretty bad PR. And it's the whole theory behind having dual cores in laptops anyway. 2 cores running at a lower clock speed is more power efficient than running one core at a higher clock speed.
Oh god... you can't be suggesting that they're going to FRAGMENT the number of cores? IPhone users will hate that.
That's exactly the way I see things headed. We will all be carrying around our "computer" and storage with us, and public places will simply augment it with larger screens and keyboard (as Motorola suggests) or in many other ways. In this way we buy the applications we use for our personal computing devices (PCD) and then have access to them everywhere we go. No more of this crap of buying software four times over for four machines at home.
Imagine walking into the living room and your PCD magically becomes the remote for your TV, VCR, DVR, or whatever. Then you walk into the kitchen and you can control the microwave, stove, and other devices with it. Walk out of the house and your phone allows you to remotely set the alarm and lock the doors. It becomes the key to your car once you are in it or allows you to remote start it. You walk near a printer at work with it and print the document you grabbed from home. The possibilities are endless.
Remember to maintain your supply of