i have always had sony phones before my galaxy wonder. and they were all nothing short of amazing. and to be honest, after using andriod i simply love it. its just a much more open platform than iOS and windows. i cant stand the restrictions and limitations that both have. i mean i have to install zune on my pc to download stuff on my phone? no thank you, go fuck yourself MS. that simply is a deal breaker for me, a lot of times i use my phone as a USB and connect it to any device. Sony has great hardware + andriod, a perfect fit for me, plus the xperia Z is water proof. something i love. i only hate that its so big

you need that much power to be able to play games like angry birds and temple run. duuhhh

I would have rather they stuck with a Quad-Core design and drove up IPC instead or used the extra TDP headroom with fewer cores to boost up the graphics pipelines.
Lightly threaded applications will hence be no faster than the Galaxy S3 if per-core performance remains the same, it will be a big boon for heavily threaded applications (I.E. Encoding) and for multi-tasking though.

8 cores (in this case 8 real threads) do not make sense even in a dedicated gaming console.

8 threads can only be properly utilized on things like:

• Multi-tasking operational systems with many of things running in background that don't access the hdd a lot (which may be the case of NexBox and PS4).
• A limited and very specific set of programs/simulations like whether forecast (many computing problems cannot be parallelized).

Also, in order try to properly utilize all the cores in ordinary applications, developers need to spend a lot of time optimizing their loops while trying to avoid problems like race condition. Furthermore, this type of optimization requires many of extra tests since code becomes nondeterministic .

It's called featurebating. Eight is more that four, so eight must be better.

Meanwhile, in the real world, phones with two powerful cores show better performance than phones with four weak cores.

Same goes for a 1080p display. It's going to have a lower framerate, chew more power for the backlight, consume more CPU/GPU cycles and RAM to run, and you'll only notice the difference from a 720p display if you bring it within a foot of your face. Be sure to enjoy those moments you hold your phone right up to your eyeball, since you're getting a worse experience the 99.9% of the time you aren't.

GPUs are an exception here. More cores in a GPU may very well mean that you get better performance while sucking up less power, and power envelope is really all that matters in a mobile SoC.

I doubt any developer will have the patience to program for eight CPU cores considering their average budgets.

Anyways since practically all modern phones are near perfect nowadays, I don't think it'll be long until most people are turned off my frequent upgrades, the smartphone craze dies off and the market crashes.

8 core CPUs. Ultrapixel camera. 1080p displays on a 4.7 inch screen.

These OEM's are getting pretty retarded.

Uhh, i'll just stick with my 4S and my fiance's S3.

Isn't it big.LITTLE? 4 A15 and 4 A7 cores non-concurrent isn't an 8 core chip, the same that Tegra3 isn't a concurrent 5 core chip.