back to article HTC prepares quad-core smartphone for 2012

HTC is preparing an onslaught in the mobile marketplace by launching the first quad-core handset in 2012. The Taiwanese manufacturer is reportedly preparing to release the HTC Edge next year, a smartphone with a 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, PocketNow reports. HTC Edge According to "reliable sources", the HTC Edge …

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  1. Rodrigo Valenzuela
    Joke

    tax free phone?

    (see title)

  2. Alex Walsh

    Power consumption

    There's no power hit on doubling the cores to 4, if I remember some slides from an ARM presentation correctly.

  3. Dirk Vandenheuvel
    FAIL

    Reminds me of the 80s... where games consoles used to wave bits around to pretend they havd more power than a less endowed competitor.

    Oh well.. I guess there will be idiots who will want a "QUAD CORE!!!!" phone.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ?

      Why would it be "pretending" if the competitor was "less endowed"?

      1. Dirk Vandenheuvel
        Holmes

        Yeah it is the 80s all over again I see.

        Number of cores is no measurement of the speed of a device (just like bits).

    2. Monty Burns

      "I don't need it ....."

      So therefore we don't? Its called progress. Deal with it. If all the people in the world has the same attitude as you, we would all running around naked, digging for roots and dragging our knuckles.

      1. MIc
        Happy

        Running around naked...

        Sounds like a good time to me. Perhaps you are on to something here.

      2. Dirk Vandenheuvel
        Holmes

        It is called marketing.

    3. Ammaross Danan
      FAIL

      Remember

      Ah, the old days when computers couldn't multi-CPU very well at all....who on earth would have needed TWO cores in their computer??? Now we have EIGHT core CPUs...how will we ever use all of those?

      </sarcasm>

      The hardware has to come first before people can write software that will use it. Imagine if Modern Warfare 3 had been written back in the N64 days... I'm sure they would have loved to do it, but no one could have played it.

  4. Richard Wharram

    More like razor blades

    The number of blades race between Gilette and Wilkinson Sword has foreshadowed this.

  5. Mikel
    Thumb Up

    Fifth core

    The presence of a fifth extremely low power core for network monitoring and other low-power-required stuff should do the trick for longer life in this phone, if you're not watching HD movies on it. NVidia says the power use overall is no worse than Tegra 2 also. Should be a neat piece of gear.

  6. JDX Gold badge

    Needed?

    A single-core 1.5GHz chip is equivalent to a Pentium 4, which could run your whole desktop PC rather well!

    What do phones DO with all this power, given that most apps are pretty simple compared to stuff like Call of Duty or Photoshop?!

    1. M Gale

      1.5ghz x86 != 1.5ghz ARM11 != 1.5ghz ARM Cortex A-something

      See title. The ARM will likely be less powerful than an equivalent-clocked x86 CPU, however it will most likely have a higher MIPS-per-watt rating, hence ARM's use in low-power hardware like phones and portable games consoles. Intel have tried to get into the MIPS-per-watt competition with the Atom chips, but it's still something of a one-horse race.

      1. Eddie Edwards
        Happy

        Hmm

        Except the ARM mentioned has out-of-order speculative superscalar issue and none of the traps associated with byte-oriented instruction decode of a legacy ISA, so in fact it's probably just as fast in-core as an x86 of the generation mentioned, and it probably has a faster RAM interface too.

        Damn right it'll flay the x86 part on MIPS per watt too.

        Keep up - ARM are :)

    2. ZillaOfManilla

      Phones surf

      Or at least smartphones do a hell of a lot of browsing, including things like catchup TV. So that power is useful.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Still not as powerful as the 8-core tegra 1!

    Now THAT was a beast. 8 cores, and it was in microsoft's zune (remember that? No, me neither.) At least that was claimed at the time - it turned out that the 8 cores included things like the power management controller, the memory controller, and the big fat controller. Oh, and one small, underpowered CPU core.

    I stopped looking at specs back then, all that matters is how well it runs actual software and how useful it is as a phone (and yes battery life is right at the top of that particular list!)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    oh I geddit

    Rule of t'internets #57

    The "feature" which the competitor introduces: be it a better camera, larger memory, bigger screen, or faster processor is utterly, utterly pointless

    ...until your favorite brand matches or beats it, in which case it becomes an essential "must have"

    1. Monty Burns
      Coat

      And it never existed, at least "properly" until your favourite brand did it.

  9. RichyS
    Facepalm

    Buttons

    If it's going to run Android 4.x, why does it persist with the buttons beneath the screen? Seems a little redundant, I;d have thought.

  10. Shades
    Stop

    This was NOT...

    ...the news I wanted to hear! My contract is up for renewal early 2012 and I was considering switching to Giff Gaff and installing Android on my HD2. I wonder how much this phone will be SIM free??

    1. Ale
      Thumb Up

      @Shades

      Go ahead and switch.

      You'll probably save about £25 for every month you're on giffgaff. When the phone is released, if you decide you want it on a subsidised network, gg has no lock in so you can just leave!

  11. twunt

    Pointless

    This is a useless gimmick - there's simply no need for a quad core phone.

    HTC should stop releasing 50 handsets a year and concentrate on 3 or 4 core products. How abourt a low end (Wildfire S), Mid Range (Desire S) and top end (Sensation) - refreshed just once a year, with a commitment to release Android updates on time, for 3 years from launch?

    1. M Gale

      One core handling the music playing, while the other is dealing with whatever the web browser is trying to throw at it, another dealing with any background tabs that might have some kind of html5 goodness requiring some kind of constant attention, and underneath all that another core getting loaded up with OS services and stray browser processes and making sure there's no ugly UI stuttering or lag when someone interrupts all that lot by daring to interrupt you with a phone call...

      Yes I can see a use for four cores, or maybe even more, if their idle current consumption is low enough. That's not including whatever 3D gubbins is bolted onto the latest generation of Internet terminal/portable games machine/media device that people call a "phone" these days.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    bah!

    my arm11 based e71 still does whatever i need from a phone.

    full qwerty for messaging - check

    robust email and calender support to sync with office - check

    expandable memory to store mostly songs and the odd data - check

    FM / MP3 player for those times when i get bored - check

    GPS with google maps for when i get lost - check

    Wifi for when i want to stream youtube / internet radio - check

    midnight pool for when i'm visiting the guv - check

    battery that lasts for days instead of hours - check

    superb voice quality when making calls - check

    bluetooth to pair with my laptop, handsfree other phones - check

    it even has infrared though it's been ages since i used that

    so what exactly am i missing?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "so what exactly am i missing?"

      A shift key?

      1. James O'Brien
        Coffee/keyboard

        Hehe keyboard please

      2. bolccg
        Thumb Up

        Bravo Stike Vomit...

        Bravo!

  13. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Four cores will be under powered ...

    ... if Microsoft provide the software.

  14. Kiralexi
    WTF?

    Re: Eddie Edwards

    "Except the ARM mentioned has out of order..."

    So did the P4.

    "speculative..."

    So did the P4.

    "superscalar issue"

    Yep. And the P4 issued 3 instructions per cycle, rather than 2.

    "usual vague references to the microcode decoder"

    Almost every processor - including many ARMs - have microcode. Performance impact is negligible.

    "faster RAM interface"

    Judging by ARM memory performance thus far, I'm extremely skeptical.

    1. Goat Jam
      WTF?

      The P4

      Was also, clock for clock, slower than a P3.

      If I recall correctly* it wasn't until the P4 hit something like 1.8 Ghz that it could match a P3

      * I never had one because Athlons was the CPU of choice back then and Pentium 4's were relegated to mainstream brands selling underspecc'ed crap with "intel Inside!" stickers to clueless high street buyers.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You'd have thunk on a tech website the readers would be interested in tech.

    How very strange.

    1. Evil Weevil
      Joke

      I'm not here for the tech...

      ....I only read this site for the NSFW stories and the Paris Hilton angle.

      1. MrT

        Yeah...

        ...but I'd skip the one with the dead horse in it.

        This phone will arrive nicely in time for my upgrade - and hopefully there won't be any of the current nonsense for this beastie as there is about fitting newer stuff onto older kit. Well, at least not until after the contract has actually finished...

  16. LarsG

    COMES WITH

    a saddle bag to carry it in and a two handled dynamo crank handle to keep it charged.

    Marketed as the first fitness phone requiring hand cranking every 7 minutes in use it 12 minutes on standby.

  17. uhuznaa

    Why all these pre-announcements?

    Nothing against HTC or quad-core smartphones, really -- but why do companies pre-announce phones half a year before they may or may not sell them finally? They will have a reason for that, but which reason?

    1. M Gale

      Probably a combination of...

      ...trying to get you to want it, and the competition to crap themselves. I'll also guess they're targetting more the businesses who'll be buying and selling the phones rather than end users.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What is it for?

    Prep for ARM's ultrabook assault.

    Scale up those pads and give a reasonable cpu for those with desktop apps to port to. Once the desktop apps are there, it's a smaller jump to the ultrabook format.

    Are multiple cores better than higher Ghz on low-power systems?

    We're not in phone-land anymore Toto!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re:not in phone-land anymore

    Maybe we'll finally see a "phone as pad's brain" system.

    Magnetic attachment, dumb pad, Hmmmm. /daydream

  20. Cuddles

    You mean this quad core Tegra 3:

    http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/09/nvidia_launches_five_core_arm_chip_tegra_3/

    Using 1/3 the power doesn't sound like it should really be much of a problem for battery life.

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