The desktop computer market uses multi-core processors almost exclusively, but mobile industry, both notebooks and handhelds have been a bit more limited. There are performance gains to fetch today already, but power consumption and cost have slowed the progress. In just three years all smartphones, netbooks and MID units are expected to use multi-core CPUs.
According to In-Stat we will see a wave of multi-core processors for smartphones and netbooks next year already, 2010, while retail electronics will take longer to adapt to multi-core and we should see devices with multiple cores in 2012/2013.
By 2013, 88% of all mobile processors are expected to use multiple cores, a development that will start over the coming year for both ARM and x86 components.
Multiple CPU cores aside we will also see more efficient GPU circuits.
“While multi-core dominates in the high performance mobile computing segments, integration of graphics/multimedia acceleration favors the smartphone, MID/UMPC and mobile entertainment device segment.”
