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

[Pojut]

^This. With all the hubub surrounding Tegra 2 and various other dual-core SOC designs, I'd be very surprised if the next iPhone iteration maintained a single-core design, ESPECIALLY now that iOS supports multitasking. Same goes for the iPad.

Re:iPhone

[nibbles2004]

i do , it wont be

Re:Dual core smartphones

[awyeah]

Phones are quickly becoming our primary computing device, or at least the centerpiece of our electronic lives.

Have you seen the Motorola Atrix (I think they showed it at CES)?

This thing has a laptop dock [motorola.com]. That's not a dock that you can connect to your laptop, it's an actual laptop, made for the phone - the phone docks in the back and is the computer. It basically is a big keyboard and screen for the phone.

I'm not saying that it's a good or bad thing, but it certainly is interesting. Who knows if the rest of the industry will follow suit.

Re:iPhone

[TheRaven64]

ESPECIALLY now that iOS supports multitasking

iOS has always supported multitasking. Run top on an old iPhone and you'll see lots of system daemons running in the background. It did not support more than one GUI application running at once, but this was due to memory constraints, not due to lack of CPU power. GUI apps tend to eat a load of RAM and the iPhone does not support swapping (well, actually, the kernel does, but you need to jailbreak it, install a terminal, and then turn it on). If you run more than one app, the others have to be aware of the increased memory constraints. This is less of a problem on the newer models, with more RAM, and will be irrelevant in a year or two when they all come with 2GB or so.