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  • jjj - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    It's starting to be annoying that the majority of smartphones sold now are A7/A5 based. CPU power seems to be the first that gets cut when trying to cut costs.It's a pity that so few went A15 ,maybe it gets better with A57 and 20nm, more competition would lead to better pricing but that seems a year away at best.and for now we'll be flooded with up to 8 wimpy cores.
    I wouldn't mind it all that much if some would try to reach 4mm in thickness by focusing on low power (and maybe at some point add solar on the back) but the focus is only on cost.Sure there are 5.5mm and up phones but it's not much of a trend.
  • coder543 - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    "the majority of smartphones sold now are A7/A5 based."
    Source? This statement seems blatantly false. Even if it were true, would it be so bad? The A5 isn't exciting, but the Cortex-A7 is a very solid core. The Cortex-A53 will be even better. There's plenty of CPU power in a dual core Cortex-A7 chip for most things people currently use their phones for. The GPU is more of a bottleneck. More CPU is always a good thing, all battery life being equal, but there's nothing bad about Cortex-A7 as a processor core.

    Regardless, most phones *do not* use Cortex-A5 or Cortex-A7. Until the Moto G, you couldn't even _buy_ a phone with A7 in the U.S., let alone imagine that most phones used A7 chips. I'm sure A7 phones are more common in developing markets, but I strongly doubt it is anywhere near a majority.
  • coder543 - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    Unless you're under the impression that the Apple A7 chip used in the iPhone is based on the Cortex-A7.... which it most certainly is not. I could see that confusion possibly happening.
  • jjj - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    Talk about people living in a bubble ...
    You need to learn to not open your mouth when you are not even vaguely familiar with the subject.
  • coder543 - Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - link

    As you added no factual points to this discussion, I'm not sure who you were talking to.
  • Mondozai - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    No price?
  • JoshHo - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link

    They haven't really told anything about price. It should be competitive with phones of similar spec, so I would reckon that it's around US N5 prices.
  • errorr - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    I feel that most AT readers are confused about the true volume numbers in phone shipments. There is a huge difference in the Value of the types of SOC's sold and the volume.

    The high end chips that end up in the phones destined for the people who read this site are a fraction of the total shipments of chips.

    I don't really care about the $50-$100 phone market and the dual core A5 and A7 chips that go into them. However, there is some interest in how rockchip, mediatek, etc... try and to expand into the area dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung.

    At the same time Qualcomm especially is trying to expand into the high volume low margin quad A7 market.

    Qualcomm killer tech is their modem integration which makes them required tech for any 1st world country phone. But the rest of the world doesn't have LTE and the "good enough" low price chips are coming.

    Of course all of this is further obscured by the subsidy model of the American Carriers that make the US ignore the price pressures that make ZTE, Samsung, Sony, and others push lower specced phones that will sell much better outside the US.

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