With quad-core smartphones now becoming more common, Qualcomm has stressed that mobile processor core wars in the smartphone industry are pointless and are not in the interest of consumers.
CEO Paul Jacobs was speaking during the Born Mobile presentation in China when he pointed out that Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa eight-core mobile chip simply utilizes a meaningless number for a publicity stunt.
He added that, when considering energy and thermal factors, the more cores a mobile manufacturer adds into their devices, the more challenging it becomes to manage them.
The executive stressed that the core wars will die down in the future. Instead, he believes the focus should be migrating towards real advantages for consumers such as smooth interface performance and faster downloads.
One of the predominant goals of mobile CPU advancements is preserving battery life while also maintaining performance levels. Samsung is doing exactly that with its eight-core processor through the utilization of big.LTTLE architecture.
Time will tell which architecture philosophy will come out on top.
UPDATE: Our story source, Unwired View, has updated with the following: "Qualcomm contacted us to point out that Paul Jacobs’ comments were taken out of context (having something translated from English to Chinese and then back to English again can do that, no doubt). Per Qualcomm, Jacobs did not use the words “misleading” or “publicity stunt” with relation to Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa processor. Furthermore, the words “publicity stunt” were not used at all. Qualcomm’s CEO did refer to the whole general focus on the number of cores in the mobile CPU space as “misleading”, though."
