| By Peter Ferenczi | Tue Apr 19, 2011 11:31 am |
Samsung plans to ship a 2-gigahertz dual-core processor in a smartphone in 2012, showing how quickly the performance gap between handsets and larger mobile devices could blur.
"This product will have the data processing capacities of a regular PC," a "high ranking" official reportedly told Korean site Daum. The company also plans to sell the processor to other phone makers, so that level of performance could be widespread. Web browsing will probably benefit most from these super-chips, especially interactive pages with Flash content or videos. That beefy processing could also make general phone operation snappier, though today's handsets are already pretty quick. Visually intensive games could also benefit. The increased power could also enable applications that nobody has yet considered bringing to phones because of their processor requirements. Presumably that power won't come at the expense of battery life, especially if Samsung switches to a smaller process size. But as smartphone performance stops being the bottleneck it was for most of the last decade, it's worth asking if chip makers should shift focus from faster processors to enabling longer times between recharges. Whether we need it or not, mobile chips are going to get brawnier. Intel recently previewed a new generation of processors targeting smaller devices that could also help fuel the mobile processing arms race. The first 1-gigahertz smartphones debuted at the end of 2009.
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