&gt; The 6s and iPad Pro are a good demonstration of the importance of designing systems tastefully. In the rest of ARM-land, manufacturers are enthralled by octa-core designs that take up lots of die space but sit idle in most consumer workloads.<p>Unfortunately, this kind of thinking has created a real chicken-and-egg problem. I want phones to have more cores. I know how to use them. It&#x27;s not just &quot;design by specs&quot;; I have actual numbers I&#x27;ve been spending years gathering that show that multicore results in real measurable user experience wins on apps, <i>if those apps are engineered properly</i>.<p>You&#x27;re right that, by and large, apps of today do not benefit from multicore. But the ideal solution to that is not going to be to just stop adding cores to phones. It&#x27;s to fix our apps.<p>Another way to look at it is: What else are you going to spend the die space on, after all? More space for the GPU? GPU compute is even harder to use than multicore! As a result, consumer apps have even lower GPU utilization than CPU utilization (my last benchmarks in this area pulling up numbers as low as 8%).