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Posts: 1,548 | Thanked: 7,510 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic
#12
Citing the "Benefits of multi-core CPUs in mobile devices" whitepaper released by Nvidia, multi-core CPUs might actually be more power efficient:
Due to task sharing, the cores don’t need to run at full capacity and can be run at a lower
frequency and voltage. Since the power consumption of semiconductor devices is proportional
to the frequency and voltage-squared, even a small reduction in the operating frequency and
voltage will result in significant reduction in power consumption. Therefore a mobile processor
with a dual core CPU with SMP capabilities will often be more power efficient than a single core
CPU based mobile processor.
Also, there are situations when you need all peek horsepower you can get - like during application startup (no one likes to wait).

More cores make multiprocessing more seamless, not only in relation to running multiple applications simultaneously but also for single applications - make one thread run a lag free GUI and other thread/s can do all the needed time intensive data processing and computations in the background. All of this is easier when you have multiple cores.
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Last edited by MartinK; 2011-01-26 at 20:48. Reason: add link to the whitepaper
 

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