Before You Fall For That New Phone..

A 1080p display doesn’t look much different from a 720p display at normal viewing distances. A quad-core processor doesn’t provide much of a real-world benefit over a dual-core one. Photos from a 13-megapixel camera don’t look significantly better than photos from an 8-megapixel one, and shutter lag on most good smartphone cameras dropped to near zero a year ago. The improvements in the latest, most premium phones aren’t really that big of a deal. This is the bitter reality for Android phone makers right now.

Time: Diminishing Returns: The Cold, Hard Truth for CES Smartphones

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What is unclear is why the major platforms have gone to 4 cores (or 8 the way Samsung cou.nts) since the PC experience already shows that more than two processors is useless for most things (and people aren't running photoshop on their phones). It turns out that there are no strong technical reasons, it seems to be entirely down to marketing since the number of processors is used for differentiation, even for the end-user. Using process technology to get the frequency up 15% is better than adding cores beyond two.

SemiWiki: Mobile SoCs: Two Cores are Better Than Four?