It's pretty common knowledge now that anything over two cores is very much diminishing returns, outside the ridiculous state of Android benchmarking.
Adding two extra, slower Krait cores (or heaven forbid Cortex A7) won't lead to a better device, marketing bullet points aside. Of course, that seems to be all the OEMs care about. Personally I'd probably prefer a single core A15 to a quad core A7 because I have some basic knowledge about how software operates, but nobody would be willing to sell that in the Android ecosystem.
Yes but this is because developers are lazy and/or under immense time pressure and stick to what works.
Properly done, quad core does have immense benefits over dual core. But until the software catches up, your point stands. But it's important to point this out as some uninformed people think that dual core is better than quad core just by somekind of natural law, which of course, it wouldn't be if the software ecosystem caught up. And at some point it will, because you can't just wing it in the mobile space like you can on a desktop where power supply generally speaking isn't a major concern.
In China I can already find for $100 USD phones with Mediatek Octa-A7s, 1080p IPS screens, 2GB RAM. Even a now dominating Samsung would have problems fighting THAT let alone Intel. Just wait till everyone and their mom will have quad A53 paired with PowerVR Rogue or Mali 6xx/7xx this year...
Mobile technology can get a long way ahead. There are still very major constraints. Once we get strong replacement and/or integration of MS Word optimized for mobile, then we will need much more raw power. As technology progresses, so does the power of the programs running on the tech. Loading times in of itself will be seen as an artifact of a past era.
The "good enough" performance is all too true. I was actually excited for the new Tegra until I realized there was nothing on Android outside of benchmarks that can even bring Adreno 320 to its knees.
Right, but that's because as a game developer you need to hit the mainstream, which means the de facto tech you're targeting is from 2011~ ish. Remember that many of us have a Western-centric perspective plus we're more interested in tech than most people. A lot of mass market smartphones sold today are phones like the Lumia 520 or their Android-equivalents(basically S225 and there about).
When the 30th procentile is at the level of S4 Pro, that's when you'll see most games doing a lot more. At the same time, some people are targeting the high-end. The premium segment is falling in terms of relative market share due to the explosion of the A-7/A-9 SoC's made by Mediatek and their equivalents for the 2nd and 3rd world, but in terms of absolute numbers it's growing very fast. A game developer today can get away targeting the mid/high echelon and going forward, this means great stuff.
Really, I see it the other way. Silvermont is the only thing that competes with Apple's A7. Apple has a dual core Cyclone-A7 64 bit chip with Series 6 graphics. That seems like exactly like what is in Merrifield. Merrifield should take the "real world" CPU performance crown, have best in class graphics, have the best battery life (perf/watt), and be 64 bit to boot. Who else has something that can compete with that? It should be an Apple A7 that's a little faster and has better battery life.
We won't know when Merrifield is out. It could be a paper launch with phones coming out in H2 this year and that means that it has to compete with Apple A8 chip.
I agree with your implicit assumption, that Apple is now the maker of the most elegant SoC solutions out there. A7 is a wonder of effiency clock-for-clock. But A8 is hardly going to get worse. I like BK's style of low-key performance at Intel. But those favourable to Intel still has to reckon with the fact that Bay Trail wasn't the smash hit a lot of people predicted. I remember the hype when the benchmarks were relased. And it got beaten by A7, even if most of the units shipping with A7 were iPhones and Baytrail is a tablet-centric SoC.
To assume that the story will be radically different this time merits strong arguments, certainly stronger than the one's I've seen so far in this thread.