What phone apps do you guys forsee requiring dual core processors? iOS or Android

[Ns1]

any REAL need for dual core devices besides gaming?

timeframe = next 18 months

 

[Trader05]

one to disable the 2nd core to save even more battery life ..seriously i can't really think of any need besides gaming. Possibly 1080p+ output apps?

 

[Deeko]

I think the biggest benefit to dual core is multitasking. On devices that have true multitasking, you'll see a big increase when running simultaneous processes.

Also, dual core hardware could increase responsiveness as well. Doing app development, you need to keep all your processing/loading work off of the UI thread, otherwise the app starts to lag. Well, running it in a separate thread only helps so much when your hardware can only run one thread at a time.

I don't think dual core is going to a huge game changer in terms of raw performance, but I think, if the OS and apps are properly designed to take advantage, it could make for an overall smoother experience.

 

[A5]

I could dig through the archives here to the Athlon X2 and Pentium 4D launches and find people asking the same question

When it comes to multi-core architectures, it's one of the areas where the hardware has to lead the software due to the extra complexity involved in creating applications that really take advantage of it. It'll be nice for UI smoothness for now, but in a year or two you'll wonder how you ever did without it.

 

[Ns1]

It'll be nice for UI smoothness for now, but in a year or two you'll wonder how you ever did without it.

That's the thing though - with say, an 18 month upgrade cycle, is dual core right now really that important?

 

[Mopetar]

I think the biggest benefit to dual core is multitasking.

How much multitasking, especially intensive multitasking, is done on phones?

It's only possible to have one app in the foreground actively being used, and there're only so many useful things that can be done in the background. The most common example is audio-playback, but most, if not all of the modern SoCs have dedicated hardware for audio playback, so that's not even using a core.

Perhaps tablets will find more uses for additional cores, but phones are consumption devices more so than tablets, and the only good example of content production that I can think of for a phone is recording video and doing some light edits to it on the phone. Rendering is definitely something that can be done in the background, but once again, it's a job that can be offloaded to dedicated hardware.

 

[lothar]

If I'm going to be keeping a phone on contract for 2 years, I damn well be getting dual core(for Android at least).
I don't care whether there's a clear advantages to it today(now) or not.

 

[Rottie]

I would bet Steve Job would think dual core phone would replace netbook in 18 months. No?

 

[vshah]

How much multitasking, especially intensive multitasking, is done on phones?

It's only possible to have one app in the foreground actively being used, and there're only so many useful things that can be done in the background. The most common example is audio-playback, but most, if not all of the modern SoCs have dedicated hardware for audio playback, so that's not even using a core.

Perhaps tablets will find more uses for additional cores, but phones are consumption devices more so than tablets, and the only good example of content production that I can think of for a phone is recording video and doing some light edits to it on the phone. Rendering is definitely something that can be done in the background, but once again, it's a job that can be offloaded to dedicated hardware.

sometimes i have the following all running on my phone:
google maps navigation
pandora music streaming
torque datalogging
wireless hotspot

it definitely feels like all of the above at the same time strains my 1ghz single core. excited to try it out on a dual core device.

 

[Ns1]

sometimes i have the following all running on my phone:
google maps navigation
pandora music streaming
torque datalogging
wireless hotspot

it definitely feels like all of the above at the same time strains my 1ghz single core. excited to try it out on a dual core device.

Do you find wifi hotspotting considerably taxes the phone?

 

[vshah]

Do you find wifi hotspotting considerably taxes the phone?

When i'm traveling and using it to tether a laptop, not at all.

when my phone is also doing all of the above, and someone else is tethering and streaming youtube or something, then i feel it has an impact.

 

[zerocool84]

Look at how much smoother the iPad 2 is compared to the 1. It's almost a night and day difference on how fast intensive sites like Engadget load up and others. Of course there's other factors like more RAM and faster GPU but dual cores definitely do help. The Evo 3D is smooth in almost every instance as well with all those 3D effects it has.

 

[Deeko]

How much multitasking, especially intensive multitasking, is done on phones?

It's only possible to have one app in the foreground actively being used, and there're only so many useful things that can be done in the background. The most common example is audio-playback, but most, if not all of the modern SoCs have dedicated hardware for audio playback, so that's not even using a core.

Perhaps tablets will find more uses for additional cores, but phones are consumption devices more so than tablets, and the only good example of content production that I can think of for a phone is recording video and doing some light edits to it on the phone. Rendering is definitely something that can be done in the background, but once again, it's a job that can be offloaded to dedicated hardware.

I think you underestimate how much a phone might be doing in the background at once. Say you have an Android phone that's syncing with 2 email accounts, running Google Talk, has Twitter and Facebook polling for updates, and ESPN and weather widget constantly running, Pandora playing in the background, and a few other various services running - seriously, look at the running services on an Android phone, there's LOTS of them. None of those tasks are terribly processor-intensive...but when you combine them all as background processes while you're doing something else, you can definitely get competition for CPU time.

Not to mention, it doesn't take app developers 18 months to write proper multithreading support. Hell, a properly written app should already be designed that way - it just isn't reaching its full potential yet.

 

[Mopetar]

Unless you're expecting some incredibly urgent message, you really don't need to check for new emails, tweets, facebook posts more than every five to ten minutes, which isn't terribly intensive. Pandora is going to get offloaded to the dedicated audio processor and shouldn't eat a lot of CPU cycles. Not sure how much the widgets should eat up, but as long as they're not trying to be overly flashy or update every few seconds, they shouldn't be using much CPU time either.

The main problem with phones is limited memory. If you're doing all of those things you'll run out of RAM way before you peg your CPU and that's what's going to make the phone start to feel slow, especially if there are any runaway processes or apps with memory leaks.

Until the processors in phones become sufficiently powerful that they can be docked and serve as a portable workstation for word processing, etc. moving beyond two cores won't be terribly useful. Even having two cores right now is only marginally more useful than a single core. The biggest benefactors were gaming and web-browsing to a lesser extent. Almost nothing else needs an additional core.

 

[Monster_Munch]

Dual core = better battery life, since all processing is done faster and the CPU can spend more time in idle/low power mode.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Dual core = better battery life, since all processing is done faster and the CPU can spend more time in idle/low power mode.

There's an extent to which the statement is true. That's the same argument made for faster CPUs. But at what point does the CPU require too much power that it's not saving much. Multitasking as it is on a phone is limited and only a few apps can do so, and even then it's not full fledged multitasking like you have on your PC. What dual core may bring is more pc-like multitasking, but as software is right now, I can't see that many benefits.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

How about the question of what apps now on both iOS and Android fully takes advantage of the processors in the devices now?

 

[DivideBYZero]

The only OS that utilizes Dual Core properly right now is one that was designed for it(well, up to 32 cores, actually), QNX.

 

[BenSkywalker]

There's an extent to which the statement is true.

That extent is close to absolute in mobile devices. Two CPUs, both have a peak power draw of 0.5W, one is dual core, one is single core, odds are extremely high that the dual core part is going to be considerably more power efficient then the single core part. This is the sort of thing we are seeing in the ultra portable market right now, it's why Tegra2 has been utterly dominant for phones in the US for the last quarter in terms of overall performance with nothing approaching it(Exynos will certainly give it a good run, when Samsung gets it out on a global basis). Look at TBolt compared to Atrix, the TBolt gets blown away in benchmarks and is smoked on battery life(a singular example, but with Samsung's Exynos parts showing comparable results a trend is certainly building).

As far as apps that use dual core right now, if you own a dual core phone open up the app market limited to your device and check them out. Right now it's mainly games, but there are ~a dozen apps going beyond what single core devices can do available right now(in 18 months I'm sure that list will have grown by roughly an order of magnitude or so).

The main problem with phones is limited memory.

With how lightweight phone OS's are, even a fairly small amount of RAM, say 1GB, is enough to keep a dual core well fed. I see phones on the horizon with dual cores and 512MB, those are going to be RAM starved and I wouldn't be reccomending them to people.

Until the processors in phones become sufficiently powerful that they can be docked and serve as a portable workstation for word processing, etc. moving beyond two cores won't be terribly useful.

We can do that now, it's just not close to as smooth as a desktop experience. Quad core is where we need to be, luckily we won't be stuck with sluggish old dual core parts for too long, T3 will be shipping in tablets in August, hopefully by December we will have them in phones and we can start to phase out Netbooks. We will need another bump in RAM, hoping for 2GB, at that point.

 

[Mopetar]

With how lightweight phone OS's are, even a fairly small amount of RAM, say 1GB, is enough to keep a dual core well fed. I see phones on the horizon with dual cores and 512MB, those are going to be RAM starved and I wouldn't be reccomending them to people.

Only recently have phones started to ship that have 1 GB of RAM. A lot of people still have phones with 256 MB. This gets taken care of in the future as more RAM is added, but on the flip side the OS manufacturers add more features to the OS and the memory footprint continues to increase.

We can do that now, it's just not close to as smooth as a desktop experience. Quad core is where we need to be, luckily we won't be stuck with sluggish old dual core parts for too long, T3 will be shipping in tablets in August, hopefully by December we will have them in phones and we can start to phase out Netbooks. We will need another bump in RAM, hoping for 2GB, at that point.

I don't think the software support is there yet, and I don't think most manufacturers will jump on putting four cores into their phones right away. It will drive up the price and provide little tangible benefit. Reviewers have already been saying that the second core doesn't add a lot of benefit so I can't believe that adding an additional two will add much further improvement. If anything, phones will probably incorporate faster, duel core chips that provide a more noticeable performance gain.

Perhaps once Windows is ported to ARM, there might be a push for phones that are capable of running some minimal Windows install when docked. Until then, the additional performance of more cores is largely wasted on phones. A few niche products may choose to add more cores, if only to differentiate themselves in the market, but I can't see it being a tipping point.

 

[senseamp]

Loading a web page, one core to run HTML rendering, one to run Flash applet in the page.

 

[gsaldivar]

I'm using my phone for more and more tasks these days... streaming music, checking multiple email accounts, Exchange contacts/calendar, text messaging, tethering, GPS navigation, voice recognition, VoIP, checking pricing and availability of products, tracking shipments, opening PDFs, remote access, YouTube, etc...

While I don't think my Droid Incredible is a slouch at any of these tasks, as with any smartphone, there is a noticeable performance hit when many tasks are being performed at the same time.

As a result, dual-core (along with more RAM for multitasking) makes total sense to me. I'm not too concerned with battery life, as I plan to max out the battery of my next phone with the best possible upgrade available (I have a 3500mAh battery on my current phone).

 

[gorcorps]

Which apps will REQUIRE it? None, for quite a long time.

 

[A5]

That's the thing though - with say, an 18 month upgrade cycle, is dual core right now really that important?

It's not super important, but I wouldn't buy a smartphone this year that wasn't, especially since it will cost the same as the single-core phones from last year.

 

[Ns1]

ugh

guess I'll wait for SG2 or ip4s