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Qualcomm is seriously lagging Apple but so are Samsung and HiSilicon[0][1], they seem to be about the same performance. Android Authority [2] tried to explain w

• abritinthebay 9y ago
  That's somewhat over-simplifying their argument - the long and the short of it though was that Qualcomm has different business interests in chip-making (ie, bulk, cheap, quick to produce) than Apple - so Qualcomm is extremely unlikely to ever match Apple. Of course if Google did in-house SoC design and had Qualcomm as a manufacturer then of course they could do it, but that's so far no happened and at that point it's Google's chip practically speaking anyhow.
  • blackguardx 9y ago
    Qualcomm is fabless, just like most everyone else except for Intel at this point.
    • abritinthebay 9y ago
      Oh well that’s even sadder for them then. I thought they still had some factories? They used to...
• kllrnohj 9y ago
  One of the other theories I've heard is that it's partly because 4 is an unlucky number in Chinese, which is a major market. Thus why so many SoC vendors pushed to 8 core chips instead of taking those extra transistors and spending them on an L3 cache instead, which would have helped real world performance far more than the extra 4 cores do. Probably not very true, but it's a fun theory. More likely is it just looks better on the spec sheet to have more cores & ever higher burst-only frequencies rather than the things that would have more bang/buck on more real world workloads like an L3 cache would. It's why you ended up with ridiculous nonsense like the Helio X20 & X30 (10-core SoCs with only 2 good cores and 8 low power ones)
  • jdietrich 9y ago
    Those low power cores don't take up a vast amount of die area, but they substantially improve battery life. Apple seems wedded to the idea that 12 hours of screen-on time is sufficient, so they're happy to keep pushing for maximum performance; other manufacturers are willing to trade off a bit of performance for a lot more battery life.
    • kllrnohj 9y ago
      2 low power cores help battery life as they can handle all the screen off and background activity. 8 low power cores is just stupid. That 10 core chip in practice will function like a 2+2 quad. The other 6 low powers will be doing nothing of value at all.
• samfisher83 9y ago
  Samsung could make a faster chip, but they pretty much have to put a qcom chip in us phones due to the qcom tax. So having a s8 with wildly different preformance doesn't make sense. For example the exynos chips can do 4k60 but Samsung limits camera app to 4k30 to keep it in line with us phones.