Warning my post is long enough to be considered a rant, but I go into why it is stupid to look at core counts and the OS and the Software matter for it causes you to make different hardware choices and these hardware choices can actually improve the performance of the OS and Software.
How has shown Apple something like that ? Have you really read anything about this topic on android phones proving that 8 cores are being utilised ?
By controlling the hardware (chip optimization), the OS, and to some extent the software (via review but also by design guidelines)...you can actually translate specific tasks are done by specific hardware and do not need a
general purpose CPU
CPU is not the same thing as brain power of an SOC. CPU is just the most general type of brain power of an SOC.
You can actually make dedicated hardware that is orders of magnitude more efficent than a CPU but that dedicated hardware can only do certain tasks and thus you need both an OS and Software to utilize this dedicated hardware.
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This is flat out not possible on Android
Android by design is a Java type view of the world where the software has to run on all hardware regardless of how it is design. Java by its very nature encourages more usages of CPUs and less of dedicated hardware for with Java you do Option A or B
A) either code to the CPU no matter how inefficent it is from a hardware standpoint
B) you have a general purpose CPU path, but you also spend more development time making alternate paths where if you have specific hardware use these paths.
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The downside of Option B is it takes far more developer time to do Option B. You are not making one way of doing things but two to several dozen ways of doing things. In other words B is rarely done in a Java type view of the world and instead Option A is done for time is money, and developer time is something the developers focus on the most for it is their money. Unless there is some form of feedback mechanism where you get more money for doing option B,
option B never gets done in the real world
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Android like Linux which it is based off of, with Java based software is incredible for it scales up and scales down to all forms of TDPS and all forms of device factors.
But in the case of specialized devices it is better to do dedicated hardware (such as bigger GPUs, DSPs, etc) and while trying to make as good as CPU as possible, you try to make the CPU irrelevant so it does not need to be needed. You do this by fine tune the rest of the SOC, the OS, and to some extent the software.
The scary thing about Apple is they have a class leading CPU design team to compliment its SoC team, plus they get the added benefits of controlling the hardware, the OS, and to a large extent the software.
The only thing you sacrifice with this arrangement is "freedom" to come up with new ideas that do not fit into the box of Apple's App Market, and the "freedom" to try new hardware designs for Apple will only implement such hardware designs if it is something that can scale to several million devices and several million people consider this hardware change to be a must have feature. Put another way the first NFC real standards came out in 2006, the first android device that used NFC came out in 2010, the first Apple device that came out with NFC was the iPhone 6 and 6+ and the key feature was Apple Pay. Until the leg work was done to make NFC useful to several million people it was just a wasted piece of hardware which would actually detract from the rest of the phone for it would take up space that could be filled with something else such as battery, and it would take up developer time and the customer would barely use it for NFC did not scale until the neccessary hardware was there in other devices not just the Phone.
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Now all the downsides of Android for the most part go away when you have bigger form factors with more tdp, more space on the motherboard, and the device can actually take up more volume than the volume of 3/5ths of a deck of cards (63.8 cubic centimeters iphone 6, 55.1 cubic centimeters iphone SE, 90.0 cubic centimeters iphone 6+, a deck of cards has 108.2 cubic centimeters volume, I used the Iphone 6 for the 3/5ths number). Remember that 3/5ths volume of a deck of cards must also include all day battery life for we want these supercomputers on us at all times.
Why do we want these supercomputers on us at all times? Because they are artificial forms of senses (aka sensors), and artificial forms of external memory (the internet, pictures and so on). I can hear my mother who is 700 miles away, first I have to touch her by making part of her body vibrate, or I can call her name (a specific ring tone) and then I can speak to her 700 miles away. My long term memory is not limited to what I learned but what is organized human learning where as long as it is organized well I can access the knowledge of all humanity (the internet and stuff like reading what Aristotle wrote, or the most recent scientific Nature paper), I can also access other forms of long term memory such as I can look at pictures of my younger sister who died at 24, and I can hear her voice, anytime I want to, as long as the battery is charged. Put another way the phone makes us like superhuman cyborgs, but unlike the star trek borg we are actually more human due to our cellphones and in some ways more like an animal due to our cellphones for our cell phones make it easier to do our basic instincts (mob justice, twitter wars, etc)
The smart cellphone arguably is the scariest invention of humanity if you were to look at one thing. But this is not true for all of the other things I spoke about freedom (and doing hardware and software that is not part of the sanction deviced) before allow us to create other technologies, things like machine learning, things like the actual internet itself, things like a supply chain where I can get food that was farmed in Australia yet I live in America. Because of this I can eat fresh fruit that is out of season by literally 6 months without creating a greenhouse or other form of artificial environment. All of this allows us to bootstrap the already existing culture, government, social structure, etc that existed prior to the microchip and expanded it in ways that can be freaking scary at times.
(Full disclosure now that I went all mind blown on you, I have no apple devices inside my house, and while I do not consider myself a fanboy for any specific hardware or software company, I am personally a far bigger fan of Android phones than Apple iPhones)
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But back on subject, you can't look at a device and its performance in any metrics unless you consider the total device and not the individual parts. A device is far more than the sum of its individual parts, for by integrating the parts in a smart way you can do the most efficent utilization of those individual parts.
Thus talking about CPU core count is STUPID, what is the real world result of this magical number whether it is a 10 core ARM CPU, or the bullshit marketing some phone had in the past where they called it a 6 core computing device but it was a dual core snapdragon (if I recall it was the first moto x, but someone correct me), only to have nvidia in one of their Tegra SoC announcements to call their tegra K1 which come in two flavors, a 192+ core device (since it had a 192 cuda gpu cores, and either a standard cortex arm quad core, or the custom nvidia denver dual cores)
Ah ok xD
Yeah, SOCs are much more than number of cores and frequency
See you came around and understood this, even without my philosophical and long winded rant
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