Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
I believe that a lot of the development of the electronic reader goes hand in hand with the development of the microprocessor which has been evolving since the 1980s. As far as processing power that I have not seend electronic book readers take advantage of is the multi-core functionatlity, or the ability to do multiple things at the same time. This implies that an electronic reader will be able to download a book in the background while the reader is reading a different book. Also recent advancements in microprocessors have lowered the power requirements for the chip making it possible for new models of electronic readers to last longer between charges. I do not see the development of new ideas as a stumbling block to the development of the electronic reader, the only stumbling block that I can see would be the failure of developers to take advantage of new capabilities of new models of microprocessors.
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Multicore is not the same as multithreading or multitasking. Multitasking is the ability to run more than one application at a time, multithreading is the ability to treat a program as more than one running process, and multicore is the mating of more than one processor core (to improve the ability of the other two multi's) Current ebook readers, hardware wise, are able to do more than one thing at a time. The hold up is firmware related. Either the kernel supports only one thing at a time, or in the case of many that are linux based (including android based ones), the applications being run just aren't advanced enough to do more than one thing at a time. If it is an app issue, the reason for that is either they're too lazy to make it do more than one thing at a time, reduce cost (takes more time to design and make a system for doing that), or they have not done it to keep things simpler for the end user (since the ability to do more than one thing at a time often increases complexity).