Two different phone architectures with two different operating systems and personal use is hardly any real argument to your statement that more processing power does not mean it needs more power.
I am not saying it's not possible to have the same or possibly even better battery life with a faster / better / more powerful processor. What I AM saying is that in literal terms they need more power.
It is exactly why when I upgrade my computers graphics card or processor / motherboard sometimes I need to upgrade my PSU (Power Supply Unit) as well. If I just replace my graphics card with a newer one it will most likely require more power. Why? more cores, more processing... etc.
If more processing never needed more power than you wouldn't see PSU's on the store shelf because there would never be any reason to add power. I guess cell phones are magically different somehow? Like I said, you may get two phones where one has a beefier processor but the battery life between the two are about the same and that can depend on the OS and hardware architecture. Needless to say phone companies don't usually TRY to have phones with terrible battery life. But as technology goes along things get better.
I remember reading an article about 3 years ago talking about dual-cores in phones and how it's possible but the power consumption wouldn't make it worth it. Give technology time (and it moves fast) and we can now get dual-cores that perform acceptable by today's standards. If people still really wanted to research how to make single cores have better battery life they can. But that doesn't sell products.
However newer single-core / less Ghz phones are seeing an improvement in battery power. I have been researching the T-Mobile HTC Radar and apparently it by far has the best battery life of any WP7 phone out there now (In the USA at least). It's a 1Ghz single core chip but architecture is completely different than any other WP7 phone out there. Thats why the same processor in the Radar and say another phone might get different battery life. Especially if they are a different OS.
That exact same arguement was used back when android was getting sprinked (now almost drowned) with dual core. "Different architecture, different phones, different screens, different batteries, different OS [it was rumored Froyo could not use dual cores, or GPU acceleration, and Gingerbread, the next Android OS version, would be required to utilize both
]" = non comparible.
Of course, that didn't stop single core devices from having very similar and comparable battery life to their dual core sucessors.
Seriously, if that is the case, your desktop PC comaprison is even less relevant, since motherboards affect the power useage, often more, than "more cores," on a CPU. Though with Intel's tick/tock, outside of some rare server chips, each generation of chips generally draw equal or less power, even with more/equal count of cores
Also, a desktop PC doesn't need more than 300W of power, has been that way for almost a decade now. Off the shelf HP, Dell, Acer desktops are lucky to even have 300W of PSU power. Of course, if you want a massive GPU (which, if you want to know, GPUs in the past decade, since 2001 or so, have been drawing MORE power every generation, something that is opposite of general ARM SoC development), or Crossfire/SLI, then a bigger PSU is recommendable. Which is why I utilized my ownership of a Galaxy SII and Focus S. Both are relatively "this generation" devices, both have almost identical specifications, outside of the SoC utilized and OS. Both have their BSP developed by Qualcomm, and both have their operating system heavily tweaked to better utilize all avalible resources (one by MS, one by Sammy). It's the bigger part of why the Galaxy SII is generally reguarded as the first dual core phone to matter. It's the first to actually put it to good use, outside of gaming.
Back to the desktop example, it's not possible to simply double mobile chipset power consumption every three years. It can only go so far, before battery/size limitations push it right back again. Today, we are hitting a limit around 4.3-4.5" devices being the largest that one hand can reasonably operate. So battery size isn't getting better, and neither is battery tech (if I had a penny for every time a new "10x life, 10x faster charge" tech was developed but never made it anywhere, I'd be about.... $100 or so richer just in this past decade). However.... better utilization of that battery life can be done, and we are seeing that with dual cores, better GPU utilization, new display panel technology, new fabrication processes (for silicon, at least).
And again back to desktop, it's connected to a main power source, where battery life is not a concern. If you note, CPU TDP limits have been staying consistant around 95W - 130W (unless if you are AMD, in which case, you report TDP one way, and actual power consumption every generation will vary wildly), while core counts have been going up (as well with IPC, and ever so slowly, clocks). The reason you have more big PSU on the shelf are due to our GPUs.... comming from a mere ~25W of power draw (iirc) for the "will need a small nuclear reactor ATi 9700 Pro" to the massive 300W++ power draw of Fermi.... and MultiGPU to punch it even higher... well... no guessing required, it's the GPU that's driving PSU capacities up, not the CPU we are discussing.
We do see dual cores being utlized better today (iPhone 4 vs iPhone 4S - the Safari mobile browser is not GPU accelerated in javascript, where the two chips show the largest difference) over single cores. There is no real reason not to include them. ESPECIALLY, since they do not consume more power than their effectively EOL single core counterparts. The last single core SoC designs we will see in smartphones are on the 45nm process. 32nm&28nm dual cores designs are already sampling/shipping out from Samsung and Qualcomm[uses TSMC] (also likely TI, though I don't know what process node they are on right now - TI is a major foundry, 3rd largest after TSMC and GloFo; 4th if you want to count the exclusive, and elusive, Intel).
Single cores being more energy efficient than Dual cores, is simply put, a myth. It's one that plauged Android forums before the Atrix, G2x, Galaxy SII, and later toys, actually were sold and used by real people. It's one that was put to rest a long time ago for Android users. And Android is normally considered a power guzzler of impressive HW.
Oh im not trying to pick a fight either
I am just speaking from what I know. I have built many, many, many computers in my life. I haven't done so much with hardware on phones so I could be way off. I just don't see how a phone could be so different from a computer in regards to processors / power consumption in this regard. Like I said in my previous post it just doesn't make sense to me here.
Were good. Not fighting
Good discussion.
I almost didn't want to put up this post, but please, I didn't have enough energy left after to make it seem less... er... attacking? I'll try and edit it later on, but that will require some significant structural changes to my post, so I'll likely never get around to it
I'm sorry! Just know, I think you're wrong (as do a LOT of android users
), and it's going to stay that way