Nokia CEO Stephen Elop feels that dual-core and quad-core chips used in today's smartphones are not all so useful and essentially just a waste of battery. Elop revealed as much in a recent interview with the Yangcheng Evening News prior to launching the Lumia 800 smartphone in China later this month.

The chief further pointed to recent "Blown Away By Lumia" and "Smoked By Windows Phone" competitions as evidence that multi-core phones aren't always faster than their single-core counterparts. In the "Smoked" contest, Microsoft scored 640 wins with only 50 losses - not bad for a single-core handset.

The statement isn't all that surprising considering Windows Phone OS doesn't support multi-core processors and thus, neither do any of Nokia's Lumia series handsets running the Microsoft operating system. Speaking with Pocket Now late last year, a representative told the publication that Microsoft wanted to do multiple cores in a big way and they weren't ready for that just yet.

That's all expected to change later this year when Windows Phone 8 hits the market, however. Last month The Verge reported that Microsoft's Windows Phone engineering team was testing the Qualcomm MSM8960 chipset, a dual-core 1.5GHz system-on-chip.

With new Nokia phones sporting at least dual-core chips almost certainly in the pipeline, one can only wonder how long it will be before Elop changes his tune and gets behind multi-core processing.

How many of you have tried (or own) a Nokia Windows Phone and what are your thoughts regarding its single-core performance compared to other handsets you have used?