There's absolutely no performance difference whatsoever in normal usage. Really, none. Squat. Zilch. Zero.
GPU performance and memory bandwidth are waaaaaaay more important than an extra 2 cores that'll be turned off 99% of the time anyway.
GPU performance and memory bandwidth are waaaaaaay more important than an extra 2 cores that'll be turned off 99% of the time anyway.
In the case of your Photon it was also running Gingerbread which didn't have 2D hardware acceleration. Made especially worse by the fact that Tegra 2 doesn't have NEON, so the software painting was extra slow on that device AND it had a "high" resolution.
It was a badly designed device from top to bottom. A quad core wouldn't have done a damn thing to help its pitiful performance (especially as there's still only a single UI thread doing the painting)
I would not be surprised by the fact that it was poorly designed, and it's the main reason I will did not nor will not consider another Motorola phone in the future.