Quad-core smartphones: This is their year | Dialed In - CNET Blogs

Amazing innovation in mobile phone processing power. Its still sorely lacking in the battery domain


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by Jessica Dolcourt 
January 25, 2012

What quad-core does for you

If you're familiar with dual-core phones, quad-core follows the same principle. Put simply, the handset's central processor (CPU) contains four cores for divvying up tasks, rather than one or two CPUs.
The benefits are many, but distill into two overarching results: dramatically faster performance and better battery life. In other words, each core can work less to accomplish a task; and because tasks are split, each core requires a smaller battery contribution (at a lower voltage) than if fewer cores strained with heavier workloads apiece (requires higher voltage per core).

In a practical setting, quad-core processors promise to support sharp screen resolutions; load apps and render photos and Web pages faster; quickly and smoothly process HD video; and improve the quality of gameplay to bring it much closer to a desktop standard.

Just how much faster are they supposed to be? Nvidia has claimed that its Tegra 3 processor completes tasks up to five times faster than its Tegra 2 dual-core predecessor, and its chip for processing graphics (GPU) grew from 8 cores on the Tegra 2 version to 12 cores in Tegra 3."


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