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First Quad-Core Android Tablet Reviewed
adeelarshad82 writes "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4GHz each and a 'companion core' which runs alone. When tested on the Antutu system benchmark, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619, which is roughly double the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream. Benchmark results for Sunspider and Browsermark browsing scored at 17ms and 98324, respectively, which also happened to be amongst the best. The tablet weighs 1.3 pounds and measures 10.4 by 7.1 inches, but it's very slim at 0.3 inches."
Guess you're not as picky as many others then: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914 and http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=20278
For at least the past 5 years, processing performance in almost all envelopes has been limited by power consumption and/or heat (which are two sides of the same coin).
Your i3 has a 35W TDP, this CPU looks like perhaps 2-4W TDP. So yours is 3.9x the speed while using 8.8x the power. Targeting a lower performance tends to allow for better efficiency, and so does having more cores/threads to do the work. This is largely because structures in a core that improve single threaded performance have diminishing returns for the amount of power they consume (caches, out of order execution instruction windows, buffers, wide superscalar execution, etc). So you can't necessarily say the Tegra 3 is a better device than the i3, but neither can you say the i3 is better (you really need to compare the same power or performance).
Multi-core isn't going to help basic UI issues, those will all be running on a single core. The problem is Android isn't really written to be efficient. XML based UIs running in Java (with garbage collection occurring who knows when), a codebase that's frequently convoluted and an architecture that sometimes looks like someone took the Gang of Four book and tried to use every pattern at once. I mean seriously, why does setting a selection on a text view require a selection class rather than a start and end index in the widget?
If you want to fix it, you need a complete overhaul of the framework and quite likely rewrite chunks of it in C or C++.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset
You really think these compact machines use sets of chips? Quite the opposite. They're systems on a chip (SoC), often even a package on a package (PoP) i.e multiple chips layered into one package. Now, don't get smart and point out that technically a PoP is a chipset - they're used for packing an SoC with DRAM and flash memory. The multiple functions of a chipset (e.g peripheral interfaces) are all on the one chip of the SoC.