By Lawrence Latif, The Inquirer
Intel has claimed that system-on-chip (SoC) vendors have not done enough to optimise Android for multi-core processors.

Intel’s single-core Medfield Atom processor enters the market at time when almost all of the big hitting ARM vendors are focusing efforts on dual-core and quad-core processors. However Intel said that chip firms should do more to optimise Android for multi-core processors as it does not effectively make use of multiple cores.

Although Intel’s Medfield Atom processor does have pseudo multi-threading capability thanks to the firm’s Hyperthreading technology, Intel still needs to defend Medfield against the obvious question of how it can compete with quad-core processors from ARM chip designers Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung. According to Mike Bell, GM of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, the firm’s defence is that Android’s thread scheduler simply isn’t ready for multi-core processors.

Bell said, “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/or 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.”

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