Yes, you heard it correct, Intel claims that android multi-core chips are not optimized. We couldn’t blame them too and an android users know it to be true. Intel is also trying to break in the mobile market with it’s “Medfield” single-core atom processor. Although it may sound to be inferior to all the quad and dual core chips but this chip has extremely good performance and the lack of multiple cores in Medfield is not in Intel’s dictionary of worries.
In a recent interview with by The Inquirer with Intel’s GM of Mobile and Communications Mike Bell, Bell is aware of the way Android handles multiple cores, he says, “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 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.”
As Bell pointed out, Intel blames the thread scheduler (the thread scheduler is the part of the operating system that decides which core executes which app. It’s not as simple as it sounds, the scheduler figures out if there is a need to activate more cores to cope with the load or keep the extra cores asleep to preserve power) and Bell confirmed that Intel are working on a thread scheduler for Android. Bell also blamed the chip manufacturers for not doing a good enough job with their chips with their thermal and power requirements.
The performance race is getting even tougher now with Intel in the field as well with it’s impressive Medfield processor.