Quad-Core Mobile Chips Wasted On Mobiles? 336
An anonymous reader writes "Dual-core smartphones have only just hit the market, but mobile chipmakers Nvidia and Qualcomm are already turning their attention to quad-core chips. While it looks certain that tablets will be the first quad-core mobile devices in the market, chipmakers reckon they'll land in smartphones too. But do smartphones need quad-core chips? There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do. I'm interested to hear what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable"
Now. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do.
Yep true, if everything's locked up.
But provide that amount of power in an open system and there'll be people who'll find beautiful ways of suing it.
It's for smart phones as your primary computer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Battery (Score:4, Insightful)
usage scenarios are bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Multiple cores are just for multitasking? (Score:4, Insightful)
why would 4 cores be 6x as fast as a single core?
Assuming clock speed remains the same, 4 cores isn't even 4x as fast as a single core, even under the best of circumstances, due to overhead and and inefficiency derived by of breaking up one task into multiple threads. That isn't even counting the "turbo" feature that modern cpus have to increase clock speed when only a single core is in use.