4 ms·

The point of cramming lots of cores into mobile devices is apparently to reduce battery drain, not to gain processing power. This might or might not be new to y

• AnIrishDuck 15y ago
  This makes no sense to me. More cores means more processing throughput. Design advances lead to reduced power consumption. Both are happening at the same time, which is the only reason there might be any correlation.
  • moonchrome 15y ago
    More cores means specialized design (aka. nvidia one low power core and 4 high performance cores), and selective activation according to requirements. Software taking advantage of cores is still an issue tough, but for games and multimedia it's definitely not hard.
  • MaysonL 15y ago
    Well - when you can turn all but one of the cores off (or down to extremely low power consumption), and/or when you have asymmetric cores where the one core that runs alone most of the time (when the device is sitting there, waiting for user input) is an extreme low power one, then yes, more cores mean stingy power use.
  • maggit 15y ago
    Well, the thing is two cores running at, say, 800MHz burns less battery than one core running at 1.6GHz. So you get the similar (but not quite the same) processing power for less battery power. You also get less heat dissipation. Great clock rates on handheld devices are currently out of the question because they would overheat, and handset designers are reluctant to make the device big enough to fit a heatsink. Random corroborating source (with annoying popup): http://www.wirelessweek.com/articles/2011/07/devices-multi-core-app-processors-smartphones/ http://www.wirelessweek.com/articles/2011/07/devices-multi-c...