14 DAY TRIAL // Although everyone was expecting Nokia to offer a dual-core device after the company launched the first two Lumia series phones, back in October 2011, it looks like the Lumia 900 features a similar 1.4 GHz single core processor manufactured by Qualcomm.
The first thing that Nokia/Microsoft officials highlighted when they announced the Lumia 900 was the fact that the 1.4 GHz Qualcomm APQ8055 Snapdragon processor is more than enough to run any application installed on the smartphone.
Three weeks after the official announcement Nokia approached Qualcomm’s Senior Vice President Rob Chandhok for more details on Lumia 900 processor and chipset.
Customers who have waited for Nokia Lumia 900 in the hope that this will be equipped with a dual-core CPU might be disappointed now, but Mr. Chandhok claims that the processor built for Lumia 900 has a very wide range.
This means that the processor is very efficient when users want to slowly type a message, or when they need to quickly browse a certain website with rich content, or watch a video on the Web.
“What we did in our architecture of the processors in the chip we are talking about is focus on the performance of the CPU (central processing unit) relative to power and we also focus on being able to dial that up and down very efficiently so that we didn’t have to have architectures where you have a big and little core.
“It’s like the difference between having an engine that has a wide range and one that doesn’t have a wide range,” said Rob Chandhok.
Qualcomm’s official also explains that dual-core CPUs are not twice as fast, instead some the cores are used when the software runs in parallel. It also highlights the fact that most of the software “presents a single thread of workload.”
Moreover, Qualcomm’s chipset is perfectly suitable for multitasking, Chandok claims. According to him, when users are scrolling in the web browser the phone uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of the CPU.
“So we take advantage of every bit of processing power we have. And also programming on the most efficient algorithm possible,” added Chandok.