Some folks will tell you quad-core processors are a waste of battery life, including Jan’s favourite, Stephen Elop. Mind you, he’s probably changed his tune now that Microsoft has raised the hardware ceiling for Windows Phones.
Where was I? Oh, Qualcomm has chimed in on the old multi-core debate, and suggests that dual-core processors are often more than enough, hence its late arrival at the quad-core party.
That’s the story as reported by The Inquirer, which recently interviewed Sy Choudhury, director of product management at Qualcomm.
Sy says: "[We] could have launched a quad-core version of the Snapdragon S4 before the dual-core version, clearly we made a business decision to launch the dual-core version (MSM8960) before the quad-core version.
"That's really based on the workloads of 95 percent of users, even [for] a lot of the power users, the dual-core is good enough, not even good enough but more than good enough.
"If we profile most folks use-cases today on smartphones or even a tablet you are utilising up to two cores.”
Quad-core beasts include the Samsung Galaxy S III and Note 2, Google Nexus 7, and LG Optimus G. Of course, the iPhone 5 adopts a dual-core processor, though it’s said to be fairly nippy.
