Skipping the Tegra 3?

This is interesting. Asus changing the chip for their next Transformer.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/119947-asus-drops-quad-core-tegra-3-in-favor-of-dual-core-s4-in-new-transformer-tablet

David, how’re you getting on with the Transformer Prime? Would love to hear of your experience in terms of power consumption with use.

Hmm, that’s interesting. Perhaps they decided quad core just doesn’t have enough benefit for now.

Certainly I’ve found the Transformer Prime to be surprisingly unresponsive, in terms of everyday usage. Despite the beefy processor, it takes longer to launch apps such as Google+, or pop up with a keyboard even, than my Samsung Galaxy S II (dual core) does.

Having said that, it does excel at gaming. The graphics performance is fantastic, and it runs Grand Theft Auto III in full detail with very few dropped frames and instant response to any controls. In this respect, the GS2 doesn’t even come close.

Also battery life is excellent for the Transformer Prime. On its own, the tablet can sustain moderate to heavy usage and easily last the day. That’s with full screen brightness, connected to WiFi and auto sync turned on. I’ve had it get very low within 24 hours of last charge, due to the auto sync running constantly. No doubt if this was turned off, it would last a few days without being used like the iPad does.

When you buy the keyboard/battery add-on, battery life goes through the roof. It’s lasted me an entire 20 hour day, with plenty of heavy usage including a few hours of gaming, and constantly syncing my emails, calendar, news, etc. I still turn WiFi off at night, to save it chewing through battery needlessly. But for a full day’s work, it would definitely be capable of anything you can throw at it.

I dont think, that the quadcore has any real benefit - android currently lacks the ability to manage threads efficiently (like windows does) … nearly everything on android is java … and java is not very popular to be the fastest environment possible :slight_smile: It is even worse when working on different threads.

For openGL games that doesn’t matter because, they are written in native c (under the hood) and therefore has the best benefit. java doesn’t.

I am pretty sure, that the next generation of prozessors (even smaller, even faster, less power consumptioning) will bring much more benefit to android phones than more cores can.