With MWC just around the corner, one of the hot topics is quad-core smartphones.
HTC have been the most talked about manufacturer and are rumoured to be announcing a quad-core handset.
4 times the power and capability of a standard processor, twice that of a dual-core it all sounds very exciting and will no doubt give true credibility to begin a breed of smartphones often referred to as superphones.
Gaming, 3D graphics and more will improve and give an even better experience, a superphone will allow for more and more to be done on a mobile device and it all sounds fantastic but I can’t help being a little bit of a pessimist here.
It has realistically been about 18-24 months that dual-core handsets have been on the market and only in the last 8 months or so have dual-core handsets begun to take off in a big way. There are still however millions of phones using single core processors. Even now new phones are still coming out with single core 1, 1.4 and 1.5GHz processors.
Dual-core definitely has benefits and quad-core will have even more and I am an advocate for pushing forward mobile technology but I can’t stop myself from thinking dual-core has not even settled in yet!
5 years ago the most powerful phones and PDA’s had processors of say 300-600Mhz. All this time later, and devices are still produced with speeds of approximately 2 times this.
Dual-core is here to stay but devices have yet to get the most out of the 2 cores. If manufacturers can 5 years on produce still very capable phones with a 1GHz processor it shows that there has to be more work done on optimising the dual-core.
It takes time for everyone to adopt, invest and develop these technologies so is quad-core really all that great? Is it just for marketing purposes to make it sound better?
If time and money was invested into optimising a dual-core in the next 12 months, would it actually be better than a quad-core?
Think of car engines, they come in all different sizes but it doesn’t mean that the 4 litre is always better than the 2 litre, because if the engine has been tuned and parts customised the 2 litre can soon be more powerful than the 4. Is this the same with smartphones?
I guess time will tell as to which will be the winner.