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I recently purchased a very cheap Android tablet; however, my question is actually device agnostic and my question applies to desktop PC's/laptops too.
It had 1GB RAM and 1.2 GHZ processor. It struggled to play WAV files via the default music player (MP3 was fine) - there were stutters in play back when a WAV.
My understanding is, because it's just 1 application playing 1 single audio file, there would be no advantage (assuming no other background tasks were executing) of dual or quad core and a single core CPU suffices.
I now have to buy a new device as I lost the original. So, would a 2GB RAM with 1GHZ single core CPU be more likely to play a WAV file without stutter than a 1GB RAM 2GHZ single core CPU?
1With something like an audio file there are many issues. An MP setup can help (if the code is written to take advantage of it) since the data is generally handled in a "pipeline" with one stage reading and prepping the data, another maybe doing some transformation, and another doing the actual sound generation. But just as often RAM size or "disk" speed will be the bottleneck. And any other activity on the device will of course compete for resources. – Daniel R Hicks – 2014-07-16T11:26:59.550
1We would need to know more about the original CPU. Additional memory only helps with certain tasks. Since we are talking about Android, and most Android devices are ARM based, additional memory wouldn't make a huge difference. What would make a difference is the graphical processing capabilities of the new device. As pointed out by Keltari, even the Raspberry Pi can process video, perhaps not 4k video, but it can process video without a problem. – Ramhound – 2014-07-16T11:30:38.583