Reading between the lines, this translates to cheaper multi core processors – you can fit 4 A7 cores in 1 A15 core. Another advantage is A7 is only 60% slower than A15 but consumes only 25% power. So unless there’s a major breakthrough in battery technology, an SOC with multiple light cores that you can turn turn off when unneeded would be a better choice especially when we look at the typically light loads executed in parallel on mobile processors. For heavy tasks like image/video encoding/decoding, every recent SOC already include a separate core to handle those tasks.

Speaking of light loads, how much faster do we need to go? A decade ago 400MHz ARM11 processors were powerful enough to run Garmin Mobile XT on Nokia phones. Heck, I’ve seen Youtube clips of people playing Quake 2 on a Nokia N95 from 2008. That’s full offline processing folks, no server side map processing required. Now all the hype is about more GHz, more cores, more RAM. To effectively use up all the extra processing power, you’d need to tether the phone to a wall socket because todays batteries can only handle full loads for at most 3 hours. If you do that, you might as well use an Intel i5 laptop. They even cost the same.