As long as they can keep them cool and decent battery life I'm looking forward to 4+ processors. I'm holding out on updating my D2 for something maybe quad/octa-coreI love my D2 and can't bring myself to part with it haha. Plus the challanges brought on by the super phones should be fun. Its gonna be something I'm tuned in on for sure
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I think its important for us to remember that more cores doesn't necessarily equal proportionally more processing speed. Interviews with chipset manufacturers (i believe the one I read was with Steve jobs but it was a while ago so I can't provide an exact source atm) have indicated that they're aware that theyre going to have a difficult time keeping up with the rates of improvement they've provided in the past. This is largely because despite the doubling of transistor counts every two years, software manufacturers don't know what to do with all these processors. He said they've done fairly well with two but with four they're pretty much clueless. Its hard to harness all of the processing power because if the computations exceed the capacity of the processors individual cache, it has to use the much slower general memory of the computer. Thus a bottleneck is created. As we all know, performance is only as good as the weakest link, which is often the algorithm running the hardware. Its cost prohibitive to spend so much time developing algorithms when hardware is advancing so fast. To produce much faster results, programs must be coded to use all cores simultaneously without redundancy. Parallel processing has its limits.
This may sound unrelated to the post but I think its actually central to our analysis of what is to come in terms of not just raw specs but in terms of actual performance increases. This is something Apple has always excelled at - optimization. In light of this, perhaps we can safely invest in a good dual core device without fear of falling far behind the curve.
As the OP pointed out, there's a trend toward marginal quarterly or biannual improvement. Maybe our recognizing that two cores well-optimized is better than four that aren't optimized will remind phone manufacturers that more transistors isn't enough. With twice as many cores we expect twice as much performance. Especially when retail phone pricing is approaching the price point of mid range laptops.
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