In my opinion Qualcomm got it right when they told about better cores instead more cores, despite they are now shipping 8-core SoCs, too. The rationale of that

In my opinion Qualcomm got it right when they told about better cores instead more cores, despite they are now shipping 8-core SoCs, too. The rationale of that decision comes from how difficult is doing "4 good cores" tuned for both energy-saving and high performance (e.g. Krait 400/450 in Snapdragon 800 series is an impressive design, very optimized stuff for being able to use very high clocks and fine-grained frequency scaling for battery saving). The point of 4 complex cores and 4 simpler cores (or 8 simple cores) is just because simpler core area is tiny in comparison of the total silicon: you get them almost "for free", and in many cases could outperform the complex counterpart (unless we get someday cores with dynamic pipelines being able to work both in-order and out-of-order, who knows). I hope Qualcomm gets back to 4-core designs with a custom ARM v8 optimized implementation (2.5-3GHz with independent CPU core frequency and voltage dynamic control). P.S. "Snapdragon --Better Cores, Not More Cores" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdauwqhmsas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdauwqhmsas