Quad-core processor will rule this year’s smartphones – Part 3

Of course, Samsung will give Nvidia a run for its money, with phones powered by Samsung’s own Exynos quad-core processor. The Galaxy S III could hit shelves as early as April, we hear.

Qualcomm, in the meantime, forecasts that phones with its quad-core Snapdragon processor will ship in time for the 2012 holiday season.

Just because a chipmaker promises mind-blowing performance doesn’t mean that the processor can sustain it over the lifetime of your phone. That’s why benchmarking tests and real-world observations are so important for performance geeks.

There’s more engineering that goes into a multicore processor than just the CPU and GPU, and that’s another way that chipmakers like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia compete.

How do you add cores without increasing the size of the chip, and therefore the phone? How do you make sure the additional cores don’t overheat the phone? Building-block components like transistors need to get smaller and more efficient, which takes time and a healthy dose of Moore’s Law.

Then, engineers have to figure out things like how to position the components for the best results, and code the drivers and software needed to control processing tasks. Nvidia, for instance, has added a smaller fifth core to Tegra 3, which operates at a lower lever (500MHz versus 1.5Ghz) to complete tasks while the device idles, without firing up the big guns of the other, more-powerful processing cores.

Even if a brand does get ahead, there’s always the danger that anticipation for the next, better thing will slow sales sooner than you expect. Nvidia’s dual-core, Tegra 2 contributions may have been first to market, but sales have halted in preparation for adopting Tegra 3, leaving the chipmaker warning investors to lower their expectations.

For speed demons, that’s a good sign. Slower sales, after all, will make way for quad-core smartphones to eventually proliferate, and to beat the pants off your single-core, or even dual-core Android phone.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 28 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.