Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor 177
adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."
Re:Nexus S (Score:5, Informative)
Where have you seen any announcement that Honeycomb will run on any phones? Everything we've heard is that Honeycomb will have a new interface specifically for tablets.
Re:False rumor... move along (Score:3, Informative)
Android has a HAL for GPU integration (we call it gralloc), Gingerbread brings incremental and concurrent GC in Dalvik, and the Gingerbread NDK provides for all-native development options, among other improvements. You're welcome.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/android-23-platform-and-updated-sdk.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Java overhead (Score:5, Informative)
Java is NOT slow and hasn't been for quite some time - that argument is so old it's not worth discussing anymore.
Most benchmarks put it ahead of other languages (with the exception of C and C++ to a lesser extent).
In terms of performance it's well ahead of Objective-C due to the overhead of it's dynamic dispatching (oh, and Objective-C 2 now has GC as well - it's about time).
http://www.javarants.com/2010/05/26/android-dalvik-vm-performance-is-a-threat-to-the-iphone/ [javarants.com]
The current crop of 1Ghz Android phones are every bit as fast and responsive as the iPhone4 (with it's 1Gz A4 CPU - essentially a custom Cortex-A8) so your fanbois argument just doesn't pass the smell test. Rumors are that the iPad2 and iPhone5 will ship with dual-code A4 cpus (based on the Cortex-A9), so if iOS and Objective-C are so much more efficient why does it need dual-core? It's needs it to compete against the flood of dual-core devices that will be coming in 2011 and it will need the horsepower to stave off the attack from Android which IMHO, has already surpased the iPhone in terms of features as well as usability (and I'm an iPhone user - for now).
Re:Java overhead (Score:2, Informative)
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
Java is very very fast, though its main performance problem is memory usage:
6x more memory usage than C
5x more memory usage than Go
2x more memory usage than C#