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 &quot;4 good cores&quot; tuned for both energy-saving and high performance (e.g. Krait 400&#x2F;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 &quot;for free&quot;, 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).<p>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>P.S. &quot;Snapdragon --Better Cores, Not More Cores&quot; video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qdauwqhmsas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qdauwqhmsas</a>