Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Many make a big point of single core performance of the A7 but doesn't the wide core A7's take advantage of parallelism in the code. How is this different then two cores.

I have to disagree there. As I pointed out many times before, single thread performance is very important. Much more important than having multiple cores. In theory, you are right. Performing a task with multiple cores instead of one core with the multiple performance is equal. The problem is simply that programming multiple threads is far more difficult than programming single threaded. Some acadamic people may tell you that this is not an issue but often, those guys never programmed that way. I guarantee you that 99% of the code in mobile and even on desktops is single threaded.

So, multiple cores are completely useless? No, they aren't. There are still processes. A desktop OS typically uses multi tasking, meaning that multiple programs are running "simultaneously". Usually those are idle and not doing anything in the background but some, especially the operating system, is doing quite a few tasks in parallel to the program in the foreground. Multiple cores help but even for heavy desktop usage, more than 2 cores are a waste for most usage scenarios. 4 cores/threads (in case of hyperthreading) are more than enough for anything you and me will do on a PC.

So, what's the point here? Mobile OSs like Android and iOS (actually Apple invented this, expressing my respect here) are putting applications in the background completely to idle. These are not able to perform any tasks in the background anymore unless they are put back into foreground (not going into deeper details of services here). That means, mobile OSs are even less using multiple cores than desktop ones do - therefore anything more than two cores is a stupid waste you won't benefit from, except for some rare very well programmed games maybe. Actually a hyperthreading single core is the best compromise in my opinion, but that doesn't work marketing wise it seems (Medfield has great real life performance).

So, Apple's A7 makes a lot of sense but it will be hard for Apple to double that performance by keeping their power budget below 10 Watt - a power level where they are competing with superior Intel Haswell cores. No magic pixie dust for Apple either - just hard work and experience Intel has gone through decades ago.