By Making Phones 'Sprint', We Could Make Them Run Faster

Sprinting is a concept pretty familiar to us. For a short period of time, a runner can go at extraordinary speeds--but only for a few moments. Now, some scientists want to apply the same principle to mobile phone processors, to give them the muscle to conquer difficult tasks without nuking your battery.

The basic idea is that next generation mobile processors would have dozens of cores, far more than the 5 in the state of the art Tegra 3. Most of the time, the device would use a single core. When you are checking your mail, after all, you don’t need to be able to crunch complicated numbers. Then, when heavy computation is called for, all the processors would kick on.

This isn’t sustainable, because that many cores cause an enormous amount of heat. The processor would quickly reach its max temperature, and you would have to go back down to 1 core.

"Really we're proposing making computers that can get tired," said Milo Martin of University of Pennsylvania. "But the plus side is you can do a lot more for short bursts of time."

The concept isn’t completely out there. The Tegra 3 may have 5 cores, but most of the time only one slow one is active. Then, when you start gaming, the other 4 kick on, and the slow core is deactivated. But the device is still able to cope with the strain of those 4 cores.

Any person who has ever dealt with computer overclocking knows that you can achieve greater speeds by speeding up your processor’s clock, at the cost of generating significant heat. Overclocking on a mobile phone is a problem, because there isn’t much space to stick a massive heat sink or a bowl of liquid nitrogen. But by temporarily sprinting, the device could temporarily reach incredible speeds, for a complex but temporary task.

When the research team did a simulation, they found that they could boost the performance of a 16 core processor by 10X, which is nothing to sneeze at. They are currently trying to build a processor designed along those lines.

NewScientist Photo by : kazzhx