LG Optimus 4X HD arrives with 4 cpu cores

When we thought LG was out of surprises with 6 new models announced earlier this week, it is evident that the Korean company had saved the most powerful handset until the end.

The LG Optimus 4X HD is quad-core model with the 4-PLUS-1 Tegra 3 chipset from Nvidia on-board. We expect to see a couple of more 4-PLUS-1 processors during MWC. What Nvidia has done with Tegra 3 is to have 4 relatively high clocked cores in addition to a low clocked fifth core. The fifth core is clocked much lower ~500 MHz and runs when the handset is idle or doing simple tasks like playing music in the background. This saves battery power. The four other higher clocked cores only wakes up when the phone needs more processing power. It is interesting to notice that the soon to be released dual-core Snapdragon S4 chip (Krait) from Qualcomm could be faster than the Tegra 3 with a 4 (5) core CPU. Raw processing speed is not everything. As we and others have pointed out before: the software need to utilize those multiple cores before adding even more cores will speed up those slow apps. As a general rule, fewer cores can run faster than multiple cores.

Optimus 4X HD has a large 4.7 inch display with 720x1280 HD pixel resolution. The 2150 mAh battery is very powerful, so we are curious what the combination of a new quad-core CPU, very large display and powerful battery will result in standby and talk time performance. The display technology used in the Optimus 4X HD is IPS.

LG Optimus 4X HD highlights

• 4.7 inch IPS display with 720x1280 pixel resolution
• 1.5 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 12-core GPU
• 8 megapixel camera with Backside Illumination and LED light
• 1.3 megapixel front camera
• 1 GB RAM. 16 GB eMMC storage
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 2150 mAh battery