[Nexus 4 General] albundy2010:
Its not speculation. Yes apple doesn't release much info if any of the swift core.

That doesn't mean we don't know anything. Well maybe the so called respectable tech blogs don't. Again read the anandtech iPhone review. Look at all the detail and break down of what is going on with the swift core. I bet you will find more info on the cores in the iPhone 5 there than you would here for the s4 pro in the this device.

It wasn't until moto released the x8 that we even knew the gpu had 4 cores. All this I don't bleep where I eat is absurd. Xda is modding community. Not a in depth hardware place.

You are wrong again about the prefetcher. Take two seconds and search hardware prefetcher in Google and see what comes up. Lie better! LOL.

Why didn't they make a threaded quad core? LOL!

Let's go back to design. There are different arm licenses. One to use the instruction set and the other is a license to build the ARM core. Basic examples of this. Qualcomm and apple make custom cores with the arm instruction set license. While the tegra 4 and the cores in the samsung octa are ARMS reference design. They take ARMS blueprint and just build it. Apple doesn't. The design their own custom cores. Krait is custom. Swift is custom.

But I'm loosing my train of thought so let's go back to the quad core thing. When you are designing a platform ( in this case the a6 and the iPhone 5) there are many considerations. Don't want to go into great detail because it would take to long. But we already know how massive the SoC die was on the a6. It already had a massive amount of transistors with a dual core / its massive GPU and all the other parts. Look at the die shots. You take into consideration how much power would be drawn from changing the SoC to a quad core. Along with essentially changing the rest of the chip design because those cores would then take much more die space. Adding in even more transistors....other stuff would need to go.

The a6 in the iPhone 5 already draws a ton of power when its under full load. But apple should have just went on and made a quad core right. So when any load hits it would draw even more power and create more heat. Thus it would throttle down so quick it wouldn't even be funny. Never mind the fact they design SoCs to have a maximum TDP in the first place. Never mind paying attention to the nominal frequency and just wasting a ton of power tossing high voltage at these cores just to get higher clock speeds

Your Intel core stuff is comical.

A quad core will not always outperform a dual core either in a mobile device. You have very limited thermal room in these devices. If your quad core can't keep its cores at the higher frequency because of thermal throttling you don't get better performance. You always need to weigh these things out when you're designing your platform.

Go back in time when the iPhone 5 launched. When it launched it had a top of the line SoC. So did the 4s the 4 etc. So did the iPads except for the mini. They launch with bleeding edge chips. Period.

I am looking forward to what they have done with the new iPhone. Move on to a custom a15 maybe. Or use a lower power process and bump up the click speeds. Oh you mentioned process nodes before. Size isn't everything with them. S800 is on the same size as the previous one.

A core for scheduling... Lol.