Quad-core smartphones - Do we really need them?

Ask any tech head these days about one feature they are most looking forward to in their next mobile phone and you’ll most definitely hear “quad-core”. Nvidia started this buzz in the second half of 2011, around the time of Computex 2011 with their Tegra 3 SoC (System on Chip). Later, we heard of Samsung jumping on board as well with their Exynos 5450 announcement and now, a little more than a week way from MWC, the buzz has reached fever pitch. Having more cores is certainly not a bad thing. Everyone wants a faster phone that they can do a lot more with, but I don’t think quad-core is the answer, especially for mobile phones, right now. Having cutting edge hardware is of no use until the software or Operating System (OS) can utilize it optimally and right now, hardware seems to be developing at a much faster rate, while software plays catch up. We’ve seen this happen in other segments of technology as well, like gaming, for instance. There was a time when PC games were really demanding and investing in a dual-GPU setup made sense, but today, due to everything going multi-platform, you can easily get away with a two year old graphics card without having to compromise too much. There’s a lot of buzz about how Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) is going to be a game changer, but will it be? As it turns out, it’s not that different from Honeycomb, just better optimized, a Honeycomb 2.0, if you will. Dianne Hackborn, an engineer on Google’s Android framework, gives us a clearer insight into how Android uses hardware acceleration, right from v1.0 and what has changed over the subsequent releases. ICS is better optimised, for sure, but whether it will be able to utilize more than two cores optimally, is yet to be seen. Even though Honeycomb was “fully” hardware accelerated, Tegra 2 just couldn’t translate all that power it had in to the real world, which translated into sluggish performance. While Tegra 3 fixes some of these failings, putting it in a phone just does not make sense. To start off with, it’s still using the 40nm fabrication, which doesn’t exactly sip power. You’ll need a really chunky battery for this, which could explain why all Tegra 3 phones have large screens, so the phones have to be made bigger to accommodate the larger battery, while keeping it slim.

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