Is a Core 2 duo PC faster than a Quad core android phone (S3) ? S3 can't play PS2 games but a PC can

[Silvercats]

core 2 duo 2.2 let's say.

 

[Mooncatt]

I guess it depends on what you're trying to do with it. For example, let's say you have a PC processor with a faster raw clock speed vs a phone with a lower speed. The phone may still be "faster" in some respects because it isn't running as many processes at once, so it's more efficient. You mentioned about the PS2 games, which depends on programming language emulators (not sure if there is one for Android, but never looked into it). On top of that, a PC could have a powerful video card that allows smooth playability with the games. It's not really an apples to apples question you're asking imho. Then again, I probably know just enough about all this to be dangerous, as the saying goes.

 

[Little Darwin]

Even just comparing processors and not the other supporting chips there are factors beyond number of cores and processor speeds that can impact performance. For example instruction sets etc could be a factor. A processor with a more limited instruction set may be able to process more instructions per second, but require more instructions to do real world tasks.

My knowledge on this goes back to some basic information when I was looking at x86 versus RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chips.

I just did a quick search, and the comparison above is valid, because in looking at the opening paragraphs on Wikipedia for RISC, it mentions that ARM processors are RISC-based... So there is no easy way to compare the computing power of phones/tablets to PCs because of the difference in the underlying architecture.

Reduced instruction set computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia