Great Optimization is far better than Raw Horsepower

This has kinda been getting my nerves lately, especially with all the Moto X rumours coming to the surface lately.

People have been moaning about the Motorola X only having a Dual-core processor, And how it "only" has a 720p screen, And how its "only" got a 10mp camera, and how becasue of all these things its DOA, and a POS and lots of other acronyms that arent extrapolated to mean nice things.

If we are honest, Raw horsepower is nice, in cars for instance, just raw horsepower is great, look no further than a multitude of Ferrari's, Lamborghini's and of course the Great Bughatti Veyron, but you know what is better? a finely tuned F1 engine, with precision detail , care and attention given to each bit, to rip every possibly bit of power out of that engine, but with the most efficient use of the fuel.

Now if we transition this over to smartphones (and to some extent tablets) we can see this same thing happeneing, whether it be with Samsung with the Exynos 5 Octa, an 8-Core SoC, it might be Dual Quad cores, but there are 8 physical cores , so it is an octa-core, or it might be with Qualcomm and the mind meltingly fast Snapdragon 800 having raw hore power,but having ridiculous horsepower or ridiculously high core counts (MediaTek is actually making a pure octa-core SoC, using 8 ARM Cortex A7 cores,that can be active all the time, but thats a different discussion entirely) dont make the best of phones.

The iPhone managed to get through with Sub 1Ghz processors up to the iPhone 5 , up to the (and including) the iPhone 3Gs, they all used 600Mhz ish processors, the iPhone 4, whilst being thought of as 1Ghz actually spent the majority of it's time around800Mhz, the 4S used a dual-core 800Mhz , and the iPhone 5 fluctuates between 1Ghz and 1.3Ghz.

And we cant leave out Windows phone, Many first generation windows phone, with 512mb of RAM and 1Ghz processors still perform flawlessly, and out perform some Dual-core android phones

So how can it be, that a Dual-Core 1.3Ghz phone, with 1GB of RAM can be smooother than the majority of Quad-Core android phones, and even an Octa-core one in some instances? and how can a whole group of devices, with 1Ghz SoCs and 512mb of RAM be faster than a whole heap of Android devices?

OPTIMIZATION

If Google and Motorola can eak out every morsel of power that SoC has, i dont think they'll have any problems competing with the High enders from Samsung, HTC,LG,Sony and even Moto's other phones.

The MSM8960T is the Chipset used in the Moto X (or at least that is the leaked one) , now the MSM8960, thats the Dual-Core Krait Snapdragon S4 used in last years flagships, But the 8960T , well, that's a Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, it's just got half the cores that the Nexus 4, or the LG Optimus G has.

Architecturally, the Dual-Core Snapodragon S4 Plus is almost i dentical to the S4 Pro, same clock speeds, same 28nm fabrication process, same CPU Cache, the Only thing that separates the Plus from the Pro, is the GPU, The Adreno 225 in the S4 Plus was good for it's time, but the Adreno 320 is monstrous, it's the same one used in the Snapdragon 600 that everyone on the web is clamouring about, which means it's pretty damn awesome.

So we know that the SoC is no slouch, it's got a beastly GPU and a more than capable CPU, and, like i said, if Moto/Google dqueeze the most those Krait cores can muster, and then offload a lot of the graphics stuff to the GPU, they could be on to a winner here, plus with all the extra, incredibly low power sensors, and a CPU state that was rumoured to go as low as 13.5Mhz for some background tasks, Battery life should be pretty ace, even if it does "only" have a 2200mAh battery.

Now if we move onto the topic of Batteries, would it have been nice to have a 3300mAh battery in there? sure it would have, would it have been necessary? not if the optimisations that have been rumoured come to fruition, i mean, again, the iPhone has a 1440mAh battery, a lot less than 2200mAh , and it manages to get through a day (although not easily anymore) , so yeah, a huge ass battery is the answer to androids battery problems? until Google fixes it in the android core, yes, motorola did it with their MAXX series, a monstrous battery to stem the bleeding as it were, but now google owns motorola, they are that little bit closer, and Motorola could be making sure, that every drop of juice in that Lithium cell gets used to its fullest potential.

I fully believe that the Moto X will have no problems keeping it up there with the Big ones, but you know what the best part is, i believe they arent going to market it as one, i believe they are going to market it as a phone for everyone, like the did with the £229 chromebook, the Chromebook for everyone, cheap,cheerful and with great battery life, i reckon they're going to do the same, maybe not on the price bit, but they are going to hammer this home as a phone that'll last all day, will take great photos whatever circumstance, plays every game and handles every app with ease.

Android doesnt need raw horsepower, it needs to be optimised, and if that means less phones per OEM per year, so be it.