Your phone has 4 processors working at over 1ghz and a GPU also working at stupid speeds. A single threaded system going all out, with 0 layers of abstraction,

Your phone has 4 processors working at over 1ghz and a GPU also working at stupid speeds. A single threaded system going all out, with 0 layers of abstraction, can provide a responsive system with a couple hundred megahertz and a dumb display buffer. Heck at lower resolutions you can get by with under 100mhz and you'll get by just fine. As an extreme example of this, look at the old video game consoles. Their CPUs ran in the single digit mhz range, but some of them were able to provide frame perfect controls! This was because they had a code loop that looked like 1. Get inputs 2. run game logic 3. Render graphics 4. Output graphics to screen Compare that to now days where touch screen latency on some Android phones can be over 100ms! Heck best of class touch on iOS/Android and you'll be at 40-60ms. Of course the problem with fixed game loops like that is they aren't very flexible. :) My phone needs to do a lot more than render low res graphics to the screen and handle input. Eventually Android threw enough CPU at the problem that their phones are responsive, but... it took awhile.