Fairly good article from Phone Arena on the multi core debate as of 2Q11.
My dual-core is better than your single-core, or is it? - Phone Arena
"We won't bother you with the technical details behind dual-core chipsets, we've written a separate article on that, if you want to know more. For now, the two visible advantages of having a dual-core CPU in your phone or tablet – Full HD 1080p video recording, and faster webpage rendering - are not on the top of everyone's list when choosing a phone, but they do hint at the possibilities that multicore chipsets are enabling.
Another area where dual-core shines is browsing. NVIDIA explains the page loading and script rendering speed phenomenon with dual-core very well in its Tegra 2 white papers. While most applications are written for single core processors, Android’s current WebKit-based browser is coded to take advantage of more cores, if available. With one CPU only, it is “slicing” its productive cycles – fetches the page, for example, then hits something like a Flash animation, processes the animation, then goes back to rendering the text, pictures and the rest of the website, until it hits the next thing, like JavaScript, which slows loading times.
Dual-core phones keep rendering the page with one core, while the other is executing a script, speeding pageloading and overall performance times significantly. ARM-based chipsets are also capable of what Intel calls HUGI (Hurry Up and Get Idle), boosting the cores when something needs to be executed quickly, then efficiently throttling down speed to preserve power.
And now we come to the Achilles heel of dual-core phones and tablets – software support. The multicore optimization of Android Honeycomb will come to phones with Android Ice Cream Sandwich later this year, and we are positive Apple will include optimizations in iOS 5 to take true advantage of the A5 chipset in the iPad 2 and most probably the next iPhone. Apps, however, that are written from the ground-up for dual-core mobile chipsets, are few and far between - you probably have enough fingers on you to count them all both for Android, and iOS. As you can guess, they are mostly games, where CPU/GPU power matters most.
Great Battles Medieval has become the poster child when it comes to demoing how two or more cores are better than one on Android. As a real-time strategy game, it allows for hundreds of beautifully-rendered warriors to enter battle at once on your screen, complexity that would be impossible on single-core chipsets.
As for battery life, contrary to urban myths, we aren’t observing degraded metrics. Android phones with suboptimal power management barely make the workday even with single-core chipsets. Phones with well thought-out power management perform better than average, dual-core might and all. The Samsung Galaxy S II allowed us 62 hours between recharges with normal usage, running the often chastised in that respect Android, and that’s without the recent firmware update.
Coming back to our imaginary friend waving their dual-core gadget in our face – do they have bragging rights? Yes, be it only for the gain in browser performance and the Full HD video capture. Is dual-core a staple necessity? Not until more quality software gets developed with multicore in mind from the onset."
My dual-core is better than your single-core, or is it? - Phone Arena
"We won't bother you with the technical details behind dual-core chipsets, we've written a separate article on that, if you want to know more. For now, the two visible advantages of having a dual-core CPU in your phone or tablet – Full HD 1080p video recording, and faster webpage rendering - are not on the top of everyone's list when choosing a phone, but they do hint at the possibilities that multicore chipsets are enabling.
Another area where dual-core shines is browsing. NVIDIA explains the page loading and script rendering speed phenomenon with dual-core very well in its Tegra 2 white papers. While most applications are written for single core processors, Android’s current WebKit-based browser is coded to take advantage of more cores, if available. With one CPU only, it is “slicing” its productive cycles – fetches the page, for example, then hits something like a Flash animation, processes the animation, then goes back to rendering the text, pictures and the rest of the website, until it hits the next thing, like JavaScript, which slows loading times.
Dual-core phones keep rendering the page with one core, while the other is executing a script, speeding pageloading and overall performance times significantly. ARM-based chipsets are also capable of what Intel calls HUGI (Hurry Up and Get Idle), boosting the cores when something needs to be executed quickly, then efficiently throttling down speed to preserve power.
And now we come to the Achilles heel of dual-core phones and tablets – software support. The multicore optimization of Android Honeycomb will come to phones with Android Ice Cream Sandwich later this year, and we are positive Apple will include optimizations in iOS 5 to take true advantage of the A5 chipset in the iPad 2 and most probably the next iPhone. Apps, however, that are written from the ground-up for dual-core mobile chipsets, are few and far between - you probably have enough fingers on you to count them all both for Android, and iOS. As you can guess, they are mostly games, where CPU/GPU power matters most.
Great Battles Medieval has become the poster child when it comes to demoing how two or more cores are better than one on Android. As a real-time strategy game, it allows for hundreds of beautifully-rendered warriors to enter battle at once on your screen, complexity that would be impossible on single-core chipsets.
As for battery life, contrary to urban myths, we aren’t observing degraded metrics. Android phones with suboptimal power management barely make the workday even with single-core chipsets. Phones with well thought-out power management perform better than average, dual-core might and all. The Samsung Galaxy S II allowed us 62 hours between recharges with normal usage, running the often chastised in that respect Android, and that’s without the recent firmware update.
Coming back to our imaginary friend waving their dual-core gadget in our face – do they have bragging rights? Yes, be it only for the gain in browser performance and the Full HD video capture. Is dual-core a staple necessity? Not until more quality software gets developed with multicore in mind from the onset."
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