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."

Re:iPhone already has dual core!

[Pojut]

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.

Re:Can't see why "dual core" would be a selling po

[Cornelius the Great]

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 [wikipedia.org] will have docks that allow them become netbook and HTPC replacements, people will find uses for that extra core.

Re:Nothing will persuade iPhone users to switch

[Krakadoom]

I have. I have never tried to talk to an Applevangelist since about their tech habits. Your phone could make coffee, iron shirts, cook dinner and give you a hummer - iFetishists would still tell you about how glorious THEIR device is, because it has a shiny interface.

Re:iPhone

[dagamer34]

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 [nvidia.com]

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.

Re:iPhone

[dc29A]

iOS only supports true multitasking for a limited number of applications (phone, music player, voip, etc ...) , for everything else is it's not multitasking but swapping out programs left and right.

Re:Can't see why "dual core" would be a selling po

[Cornelius the Great]

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.