The Symbian Foundation has revealed it now has the Symbian OS running in a test symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration on an evaluation handset.

In a post on the Symbian Foundation blog, executive director Lee Williams wrote that "a team at ST-Ericsson, and ARM have the operating system now running on a highly capable SMP configuration."

The test platform is apparently a reference smart phone built around a ST-Ericsson U8500 chip, one of the first silicon implementations of ARM's Cortex-A9 MPCore, a multi-core version of the ARM architecture found in almost all today's smartphones.

Williams said that multi-core handsets can accommodate features such as high-definition video and hardware accelerated 3D Graphics supporting OpenGL.

Symbian said it intended to support the Cortex-A9 MPCore architecture when it was announced in 2007, but that multiple core processing is only likely to be used when required, to preserve battery life on handsets.