But these days, early adopters and gadget fans are disappointed when new smartphones debut with single core processors.
It was easy to be impressed with a single core, one gigahertz phone because most phone processors were much slower, with speeds of 300 to 620 megahertz.
Until now all these devices have been one-off prototypes, but CUPP's partnering with Origin to make the PunkThis board available as an option on the EON11-S. The machine we played with was a pre-production unit using CUPP's single core ARM module running Gingerbread, but the company is working on a multi-core version with Jelly Bean.
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The cores could work together to accomplish more than any hot-running, single-core Pentium could do alone.
Both will pack a 1.2GHz processor, likely of the single-core variety, and neither is boasting impressive screen resolutions.
It features a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) display, a single-core 1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM and Android 2.3 ( Gingerbread).
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It features a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) display, a single-core 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean).
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But again, it's playing in a league of Windows Phone's single-core own.
But the Bold 9900 also features a fixed-focus camera, no front-facing camera, only single-core processor technology and a sub-3 inch screen size.
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Internally, the Aakash uses a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 running at 800 MHz, an video co-processor to provide HD video, and 256 MB of RAM.
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Even the most advanced of them, the 700, possesses just a 3.2 inch display, a single-core processor and does not offer a front-facing camera.
With Samsung's comments about an "unsatisfactory user experience" with Android 4.0, I feared it would overwhelm my poor old phone and its single-core ARM Cortex-A8 processor.
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It doesn't help matters when you're trying to render that inefficient code on extremely low-end hardware, like the sub-1GHz single-core chip inside the ZTE Open.
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While the Lumia 900's processor is single-core, not the common dual-core found on other high-end phones, I found the phone worked smoothly and quickly, and played videos fine.
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Not to forget the Evo 7, this tablet features a 7-inch WSVGA (1, 024 x 600) display, 1GB RAM, a single-core 1GHz CPU and Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
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Just as we heard, there's about a 20 percent improvement -- most other single-core Atom N450 netbooks score around 1, 200 on PCMark05, while the Mini 5103 notched a 1, 866.
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In my own personal experience, dual-core processor laptops tend to hold up better after three years of use (2008 to 2011) than laptops with a single-core processor (2005 to 2008).
The Z600 line of low-power single-core chips released a year ago were said by Intel to be the fastest smartphone chip at the time and capable of 1080p video.
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Now we'd like to say we felt the performance improvements over single-core netbooks almost instantaneously, but that's not the case thanks to an abundant amount of software preloaded up on the 5103.
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It features a 7-inch WSVGA (1, 024 x 600) TFT display, 1GB RAM and a single-core 1GHz CPU. The tablet lacks a rear camera but retains the front-facing VGA setup for video chats.
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As single-core handsets go, this one was quite brisk, loaded up with a 1GHz MTK 6575 CPU buffered by 1GB RAM that handled the mostly stock version of Android 4.0.4 with ease.
Now, we'd heard from our sources before that the X2 would be warmed over with a front-facing camera and the same 1.2GHz single-core processor bump that the Chinese version recently received.
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Considering this isn't part of the outfit's top shelf portfolio, its mix of specs have been kept quite modest: there's a single-core 1.2GHz Cortex A8 CPU underneath that 1, 024 x 600 IPS display.
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Last week we reported on the rumored Sony Ericsson Nozumi, a smartphone that will likely feature a 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm S2 CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, and 4.3-inch display with 1280 x 720 resolution.
Other than this omission, however, the Solo offers much of the same specs as before, which includes a single-core 1GHz MediaTek MT6575 SoC, a 4.3-inch qHD display, a 5-megapixel camera and a 1, 500mAh battery.
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Expect the market this year to segment itself between performance-minded tablets and smartphones powered by dual-core ARM chips based around the 1 GHz Cortex A9-MPCore, and less-expensive mass-market offerings running single-core versions of the A9.
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The P'9981 offers many of the same innards as the BlackBerry Bold, complete with a 1.2GHz single-core CPU, HD video recording capabilities, 640 x 480 display, 8GB of onboard memory, a microSD expansion slot and an inbuilt NFC module.
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