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Originally Posted by SeaKing
It is kind of like engines. If you have a 8 or 12 cylinder engine, you will use more gas than a 4 or 6 cylinder engine. Sometimes the big engines on the expensive cars can actually cut off several cylinders when they aren't needed to become more economical. In past wars, there have been cases where cars have had cylinders blocked and the valves stopped to make them economical because of gas shortages. Yes it made the engine jumpy but the engine used less gas.
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The car analogy is nice but somewhat inadequate in this case. It is probably easiest to just link to the high-level [link=http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/tegra_white_papers/Benefits-of-Multi-core-CPUs-in-Mobile-Devices_Ver1.2.pdf]nVIDIA paper on multi-core devices[/link].
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Usually also when you are multitasking I think the multiple cores might separate out the tasks. I have never been sure about how that works though.
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Most Android applications are multi-threaded, meaning the programmer separated out the tasks intelligently (you pretty much have to in order for your application to be responsive). Once you have more than one thread, the operating system can assign tasks to each core to keep them busy.
Then you have the system functions (like running the radios) that are each discrete tasks.
And then there is multitasking, which on Android generally means background services (since you can really only run one activity at a time) such as checking email, playing music, and synchronizing your contacts. These can also be farmed out to cores.
So there is this huge list of "to do" items that Android has to deal with, and multiple cores means there are more assistants on hand to chug through the list.