A "kernel war" has started in the smartphone chipset segment in the past years, from the single-core to dual-core, quad-core and eight-core chipsets, MTK released the ten-core chipset Helio X20 in this year.
Qualcomm is the “victim” of the "kernel war", which reluctantly followed MTK's footsteps, at first it repeatedly asserted that eight-core chipsets were useless, but finally launched eight-core chipsets to meet the market demands.
In this year, soon after the news that MTK would launch ten-core chipsets, rumors spread that Qualcomm would follow up and release ten-core chipsets. However, it seems that Qualcomm has decided to stop its plan. The latest flagship chipset Snapdragon 820 is only of quad-core. Qualcomm hopes to solve the "wrong" marketing model by the powerful performances of its chipsets.
In the recently held 2015 Qualcomm 3G/LTE summit, Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, the EVP and co-president of Qualcomm, said in an interview that the number of a chipset’s core was not the most important thing, but the quality was. The performance of the core are evaluated from three properties, the first is the single-threaded benchmark test, the second is the multi-threaded benchmark test and the last is the performance level that it reaches. Snapdragon 820 adopts the self-customized micro architecture, in addition, it is also integrated with the Adreno 530 GPU, Spectra ISP and Hexagon 680 DSP, making it fully qualified to provide enough power for the smartphones.
The EVP and co-president of Qualcomm Cristiano Amon pointed out, Qualcomm has rich experiences in providing services for the high-end customers and focusing on what the customers really need. "We do not need ten-core chipsets in the future, the simply developed ten-core chipsets without any customized functions in the CPU are simple, which can’t bring enhanced user experiences to the customers".