You know the ridiculous MHz race back in the early 1990s with all the 386 and 486 processors? Well, the same can also be said of cell phone processors, although not up to the extent of the 80×86 processor era. Nokia’s latest Nokia 500 smartphone which was launched just yesterday was touted to come with a 1GHz chip – but it seems as though you do not really get 1GHz worth of performance on paper since it runs on the old ARM11 architecture in comparison to what is available today.
Just to get a better idea, Apple made the jump to the ARM Cortex A8 with the iPhone 3GS back in 2009, which is a whole generation ahead of the ARM11. As for NVIDIA, they have the Cortex A9 in the Tegra 2, making it a couple of generations ahead of the ARM11.
Strangely enough, it isn’t to say Nokia has no experience at all with the Cortex A8 in the past, since the N900 does boast of that chip. Apart from that, the Nokia 500 lacks a graphics processor, so even if there was a clock speed increase compared to other Symbian^3 powered devices such as the N8, E7 and C7, would mean those additional clock speed is spent rendering everything in software.
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