That eight-core smartphone isn’t as fast as you think it is

Ever since the first quad-core smartphone and tablet designs began to show up in market, we’ve been asking whether or not these devices offered meaningful performance improvements over lower core counts. Not only are there software issues to contend with, since without multi-threading support, adding new cores is literally useless, there are also significant concerns around power consumption. Adding more cores means more heat, and smartphones, with ~2.5W operating envelopes, just aren’t designed for high-speed multi-core operation.