Hey all,
Keep in mind something about the new dual core and end of year quad cores coming out. This is especially true for the apple phones given their limited UI experience.. but in most cases, multiple cores are not going to help greatly. Android of course uses multi-tasking MUCH better than Apple primarily because you can actually run widgets on your phones/tablets, where as iphone/ipad the UI only allows for one app to take up the whole screen. That said, like iphone/ipad, when you click an app to run, it takes up the screen and is the "top" app running. Even though the impression is given that you're running multiple apps at once, sadly that isn't the case. Well.. not sadly..we'd have a 20 minute battery life if we were. Due to battery drain, android and apple took the "right path" in multi tasking on these devices. The top app runs, the rest of the apps are in a paused mode. They may still be in memory, but they are not executing. HOWEVER, before I get flamed by anyone that wants to counter this.. it is completely possible for some apps to still be running.. any app that uses threads within the app could very well NOT stop a thread and it could be running. This is similar to background apps (processes) running. Of course, these are badly written apps if they allow a thread to continue to run while not the top app AND are not a background process (aka.. no UI or a widget).
So, the main benefit of multi-core on phones at least for Android is widgets and background processes will be snappier. However, generally..you don't want too many of these things running or you'll drain your battery faster. In the case of the top app on both platforms, the multi-core can be utilized by threads.. although to be honest I don't quite know how threading works on apples platform. I am hoping the Dalvik JVM uses them in such a way that if two cores exist, both cores can be used for multiple threads..but I have not ready anything in regards to how a single app with multiple threads will utilize a multi-core chip yet. It's possible that the Dalvik JVM doesn't support it correctly too.. after all they are just coming out and most of them are still running 2.2.. which has been out a while now long before multi-core chips. One of these days I'll ask on the dev forums how the Dalvik JVM handles threads within a single app and multi-cores.
As for the OP.. the Bionic will technically be snappier even with less memory. If you load three apps on both phones, and consume 450MB of ram.. in both phones there is RAM left over.. so the bionic would most likely be a lot snappier. Since Android has built in automatic "shutdown of resources" management.. if on the Bionic you have too many apps open, android will shut down apps to make more room for the top app anyway..and I've not heard of a single android app using 512MB ram.. it's only recently phones with that much memory are available. It would be really stupid for any developer hoping to target the large variety of devices to consider even using 1/2 that memory. There are still a large volume of 256MB ram devices.
Finally.. all that said, I am quite surprised that the Atrix has 1GB and the Bionic only 512MB.. with 2 cores..I don't understand why they didn't put 1GB on this device. There are rumors that it may be possible to replace the 512MB with 1GB ddr2..but I don't know that I want to void my warranty to find out. I am sure the bionic will be a magnitude faster than my current Droid 1.
