I haven't followed much what's been happening in mobile CPUs lately, but I remember reading at least a couple of years ago that they were already making multi-c

I haven't followed much what's been happening in mobile CPUs lately, but I remember reading at least a couple of years ago that they were already making multi-core CPUs set up to run a single core at low-speed, sometimes a specifically-designed low-power core, for routine sync tasks, and only fire up more CPUs and up-clock the running ones when required. I'm sure they're either doing it already, or have stopped for good reason. Another thing that I believe Android has built into Lollipop is trying to coalesce app syncs - instead of letting each app sync whenever it feels like it, group them all together to run at once, so you only fire up the CPU and radios once. I also wonder now how those pagers worked. Seems kinda impractical to listen continuously at those power levels. I wonder if the device polled the tower periodically, or only listened at some interval?