Marvell debuts quad core Armada ARM processor for kicking your mobile apps in the face
By Paul Miller 
posted January 6th 2010 12:49PM
posted January 6th 2010 12:49PM
posted January 6th 2010 12:49PM
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Quad-Core you say? Yes please!
unless this is going into a smartbook i dont see a need for this. the battery life of a smartphone with a quad-core would be miserable.
@saturnblackhole
Depends what Nanometer fabrication it is and the clock frequency it runs on, the power consumption etc..
@saturnblackhole
Not necessarily. ARM is a pretty clever architecture. Clock speeds can be dynamically adjusted to suit current needs, and you can completely shut down cores that are not in use. At idle, a quad-core ARM chip wouldn't use any more power than a single-core chip. It would almost certainly use more at full tilt, but it would also be getting a lot more done in the same amount of time. In other words, the total power used to perform a given task is not much higher for four cores than it is for one core. The quad-core chip just completes the task (and uses the power) faster.
@Chip: That assumes that you don't give the phone more tasks to do, because it's faster. For example, if a 1-core chip is able to display an animation at 10fps, you might decide to display 40fps on the quad-core chip, thus doing four times as much work. This is a processor, not a graphics unit, but some such work - scrolling, for instance - may involve CPU.
Of course, whether programmers manage to make highly multithreaded browsers that would use all four cores at once is, um, open to question. It's arguable that using more than a couple of cores even on a PC is a bit of a challenge (one program on my dual-core PC, actually a Mac but whatever, is currently busy doing CPU work in the background, which is taking up exactly 50% CPU... I wonder why that could be) - some applications (video and photo editing, etc) are easily parallelisable but nobody uses serious video/photo processing applications on phones. And if they did then you'd be back to 'wow, if I run [clever multi-threaded application X] my battery only lasts an hour' territory, anyhow.
(Another way of using more power is due to user behaviour; imagine an interface as exists on most phones where you can either click through gallery photos one by one, or else go to a list of names and scroll to pick the specific one you want and only load that. If clicking through the full photos is slow, you'll go to the list and jump directly to a single photo. If it's fast, you might page through a bunch of photos to get to it, thus making your phone do more work. And really, if having a super-fast CPU *doesn't* change user behaviour to do things which actually require that power, what's the point?)
I would think the quad core versions would initially be aimed at 'smartbooks' and similar applications where a larger battery is available. A quad core Cortex A9 probably uses about the same peak power as a single-core Intel Atom, so if you couple that with the power-saving advantages of complete system-on-chips in general and non-Intel graphics in particular, it's good news for netbook battery life; not such good news for a phone.
Is that some sort of Kindle contender in the photo? What? An e-ink e-book reader with web browser functionality too?
@Dr Yusuf AlKindi It's the Spring Design Alex, it's more a nook competitor than anything else.
@taitherin
Or what the Nook was ripped off from, depending on who you believe: http://is.gd/5OOYQ
Nook + ugly stick = Alex
DS2 getting the Tegra 2? Thought it might just be the Tegra. We shall see, Engadget, we shall seeeee.
@(Unverified)
too bad the ds2 doesn't come with droid also, might be interesting if the ds2 became a phone too.
@Dr Yusuf AlKindi Alex + Style Stick = Nook is more like it