Monday 11 June 2012

11/06/2012

Intel and the 'Single-core is better' claim.


   Intel has caused a stir today by claiming that Android only needs single-core processors. I'm pretty sure everyone in the industry would beg to differ because dual-core support arrived on Android in version 2.3.4 which arrived in April of 2011. 
   
   The company went on to say that in Android 4.0 ICS, dual-cores processing is of little benefit most of the time. Intel also claims that its testing showed the dual cores could be detrimental to performance, especially in battery life terms. 

“If you are in a non-power constrained case, I think multiple cores make a lot of sense because you can run the cores full out, you can actually heavily load them and/or if the operating system has a good thread scheduler. A lot of stuff we are dealing with, thread scheduling and thread affinity, isn’t there yet and on top of that, largely when the operating system goes to do a single task, a lot of other stuff stops. So as we move to multiple cores, we’re actually putting a lot of investment into software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it."

The news in brief: 

  • Microsoft has apparently checked Nokia’s books and decided to end all buy-out agreements according to rumours around the web today.
  • LG has launched their Optimus 4X around Europe this week and we can expect this device to offer a good alternative to the One X and the Galaxy S3!
  • Google have confirmed that there is over 900,000 Android activations everyday, we expect them to hit a million activations a day by the Autumn.
  • Project Magenta is an open source Linux variety designed to offer a convincing imitation of iOS and it looks set to be a very successful and interesting project.

Don't forget to check back later as we'll have all of the juicy details from WWDC covered as soon as possible after the event!

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