gallier2 (gallier2.delete@this.gmx.de) on May 14, 2013 1:31 am wrote:
> Smart phones do have situations where they need quite a lot of processing power in short order. Having several
> cores, mostly idle the rest of the time, at disposition in these situations makes a difference. The processing
> power of the Galaxy S3 comes really handy when using the device as a navigation system in the car. I've never
> saw a system before that recomputed a path as fast as my phone, the navteq, tomtoms and other system I tried
> were always slower, a thing that was really annoying when you were driving in big cities like Paris, Francfort
> or Brussels. The GS3 (and I suppose all high end phones) does it at breathtaking speed and still handles the
> mp3 playing, the voice synthesis, the 3D visualisation and the calls without a sweat.


I would not be at all surprised if a single core of a modern smartphone is clocked 10x higher than the (undoubtedly single core) CPU in the the Navteq, Tomtom, etc. you're talking about, especially if you're talking about experiences a couple years ago.

I very much doubt that the recomputation the S3 is doing is multi-threaded, and the other stuff you mention is either very light load or mostly handled by something other than the CPU (3D, calls) I'll bet if you were able to disable all but one core in the S3, you wouldn't notice the difference when it was recomputing a path, and if you were able to get a Tomtom with a CPU as far as a modern smartphone, it would do the path recomputation at a similar speed (or it could be that Google's software is better written than Tomtom's)