I don’t know what the number of cores has to do with anything; because the software/app most probably can’t do anything with it.
Fact, very few programs can use anything more than one core on Windows (pick a flavor). So to every one who bought into the Intel hype about multiple cores, well sorry you bought....air. It is very hard to write software that actually uses multiple cores and beyond 95% of the coders out there. Video cards are somewhat different but their GPUs are still hard to write for.
Don’t get caught up in the hype.
And so it appears that the octa-core MediaTek processors actually do have a performance advantage over the quad-core Qualcomm chip. Of course you don’t get double the performance, and there are instances in which the Galaxy Grand 2 edges out its competition.
It’s also easy to see the effect of other variables, such as a full-HD 1080p screen vs a comparatively grainier 720p screen. The Intex Aqua Octa doesn’t have to push as many pixels as the other phones with the same processor, resulting in a marked increase in performance in graphics-heavy tests. Unfortunately, when manufacturers try to cram too many buzzword-worthy specifications into a product without seeing how they all balance out, the end user suffers a poorer experience.
Ultimately, we can see that “octa-core” isn’t just a marketing term. There are clear advantages to having the spare processing power, and MediaTek seems to have found a way to implement an eight-core SoC within a budget, and without killing battery life.
“It is very hard to write software that actually uses multiple cores ...”
For some people ;-) ... I certainly see your point, but a lot of people are getting a lot better writing applications for parallel processing systems.
Parallel processing in general has gone from “solution looking for a problem” to “solution to performance issues since we can’t continue to increase clock frequencies on CPUs easily” in recent years. It’s not hype ... it’s the best way to design general purpose CPUs moving forward.
AMD’s latest and greatest desktop processor requires 210W to run at 5GHz with all cores blazing ... that is an insane amount of power (watts, not “performance power”) ... that requires some serious cooling.
Intel went the parallel processing route to kind of work around the insane power consumption required by high clock frequency CPUs. It’s not marketing nonsense ... it’s a bona fide solution to a big problem.
Of course, as you pointed out, not many programmers exploit parallelism well ... however, that is certainly changing. Some of the tools I use for FPGA development are doing a great job using multiple processors for a single FPGA build. A lot of gaming companies are FINALLY taking advantage of it ... it’s only a matter of time before something standardized will be used to exploit all of the cores we have sitting in our CPUs :-).
What is your opinion of Blackberry OS 10?