Uhht Ohhhh… this doesn’t sound good. According to Intel, Android is not ready for multi-core chips. That is not good news!
Wait, just hold on for a sec, the Samsung Galaxy SIII, (International Version shown running Microsoft’s new “My XBOX Live” Application), whether dual-core or quad-core isn’t ready for Android???
In an interview with The Inquirer, Mike Bell, General Manager of Intel’s Mobile & communications Group had a lot to say about the way Android handles multiple cores:
“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.”
He then spoke about SoC vendors, stating, “the lack of software effort by some of the folks who have done their hardware implementation is a bigger disadvantage than anything else.”
I’m not quite sure as to how accurate this statement is, but I do agree that chip manufacturers need to so work on the software side of the device, not just internally. But, it looks like the Samsung Galaxy SIII International (Quad-Core) Version is a major hit, so only time will tell if Android is going down the tubes (doubtful), or back up the tubes to the top.
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Jay Burke
Sources info: Intel
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No, their comments are very true. The modding community addresses these issues and similar on many phones.
For instance on my Galaxy S Epic 4G it shipped with a kernel not yet optimized from armv9, a file system that samsung uses for then linux based TVs and Blu-Ray players, etc. The community enabled JIT and ARM tweaks to the kernel and scheduler, hacks to upgrade the file system to a newer (though still physical/rotational HDD optimized) ext4 file system, etc. Such tweaks have given me a phone with less lag, upgrades to 4.0.4 ICS that would otherwise be laggy and unusable, and even overclocking, which in my experience actually improves battery life as it improves single core performance.
But across many models people have noticed that improving single core performance does more for android’s smoothness and useablility than simply adding more cores. In fact many of the first dual-core snapdragon phones can be beaten in synthetic benchmarks by a tweaked single core.
Indeed right now the stock implementation of Android benefits much more from single core performance than multiple cores. BUT there is hope, especially those buying unlocked and international phones such as the nexus or unlocked galaxy quad cores: the modding community. Those who love these phones, see their potential, and are willing to spend a few hundred hours coding can eek huge performance gains on these devices. That is the best part about android, anything that Android, Google, or the Manufacturer fail to do, the community is free to do. Let us not forget that.
Intel doesn’t like it and neither does microsoft because 1 day android will take over microsoft