There a few stands (Symbian’s included) showing off Symbian OS’s SMP (Symmetrical Multi-processing) support. We’ve announced SMP support some time ago but this is the first we’ve publically shown Symbian OS actually running on multi-core hardware. The hardware in question is rather beastly actually, boasting four ARM11 cores each running at several hundred MHz! (for comparison a Nokia N95 has a single ARM11 core at 332MHz)
The plan is to optimize for power consumption. X cores running at Y MHz each consume less power than one core running at X * Y MHz so you can potentially get a lot of performance without killing the battery! Furthermore, individual cores can be powered down when not in use further saving power. A lot of the time a phone will be your pocket not doing very much, so a just single core can be kept switched on to keep things ticking over. When you then take your phone out to play games / watch videos / browse the Web it can switch on more cores as and when it needs them. All in the blink of an eye!
I can’t wait for the day when this finds its way into real phones and I can run Quake on it to dish out some serious quad damage! 
Welcome to the future!
[...] our SMP demos were running a non-hardware-accelerated version of [...]
By: ScreenPlay demos « The Smartphone Show Blog on October 23, 2008
at 12:02 am
[...] How about running Symbian on a Quad processor? Yes that’s 4 processors at one time! [...]
By: Symbian Smartphone Show Day 2 Recap | Symbian-Guru.com on October 24, 2008
at 9:53 am
good information thank you
By: madeaw on October 29, 2008
at 7:57 am
[...] Symmetrical Multi Processing: Immense processing power when you need it and clever power savings when you don’t. [...]
By: That’s all folks! « The Smartphone Show Blog on November 11, 2008
at 7:20 pm
Do you have any more detailed information about this development platform? I’m interested in the power management opportunities that may be available…
By: Etienne Le Sueur on November 26, 2008
at 7:45 am