It wouldn't quite fit my theory that Apple is smarter than the others, knowing that more than two cores are a waste in mobile applications. I really hope Apple is not going after this bigger, faster and more bullshit like Samsung.
OTOH Apple like to say they are doubling some metric or another on a pretty slide every year ;-). I would not be surprised if they went quad-core and maybe also upped their L3 to 6-8 MB to increase single-thread performance. I suppose it makes sense to take advantage of the density increase at 20nm and double the cores and then add SMT and increase clockspeed at 16FF when there is only a performance/power increase with negligible density increase which would get swallowed up anyway by adding SMT. Then they could double the SMT threads for each of the next two years (i.e. 2 to 4 and then 4 to 8) while fattening up the core in a quad-core to take advantage of it while also increasing single-thread ipc in the process. That's Apple's mobile chip sorted for the next four years ;-).
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