Texas Instruments is betting that a more powerful cell phone, one that uses identical computing cores working in parallel inside the application processor, a setup it calls symmetric multicore processing, will be here as soon as 2011. Such phones, which will be built with multicore ARM-based chips, will allow for faster processing on mobile phones without sacrificing battery life.
Most cell phone chips have multiple cores — one to handle general computing, another for graphics and perhaps some for multimedia — but symmetric multicore processing, or SMP, is new to mobile devices. Unlike servers, which have multicored chips to share a single massively parallel workload, using multiple cores inside a phone allows the operating system to divvy up the work among each core, allowing it to focus on one job instead of multitasking.
