Multicore microprocessors will be limited to two and four cores for the foreseeable future, according to ARM's chief technology officer.
"Academics have tried to solve the parallelisation of software problem but no one has truly done it," Mike Muller ARM's CTO told Electronics Weekly at Embedded World this week.
"As a result two and four core microprocessors will be the limit for some time," said Muller.
Muller said that the problem of running multiple cores in parallel efficiently was being addressed.
"The problem is all about the software architecture," said Muller.
"But it is just really tweaking the performance, there is no general purpose solution to the problem," said Muller.
The latest smartphones and tablet PCs are built around dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processors from ST-Ericsson, Nvidia, TI and Qualcomm.
Qualcomm last month announced its intention to design its first quad core ARM chip but this will not appear before 2012.
Intel currently sells dual and quad core processors to the PC market and last year introduced the first six core processor, the Core i7 980X, for the desktop market.
AMD followed with the Phenom II chip.