P25

With all the smartphone-based talk about the leading edge of the industry focusing on upcoming 10nm chips, it might be easy to forget that the majority of smartphones sold in 2017 will still be on 16nm or 28nm and are more likely to be A72/A53 based rather than A73 or custom cores. Earlier this year we have already seen the launch of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 in India, with a surprising twist: Xiaomi downgraded the SoC in that phone (with lower peak performance) over the Note 3 due to the power saving advantages of using eight ARM Cortex A53 cores on 16nm in the Snapdragon 625 over using a 2+4 configuration of A72/A53 as seen in the Note 3 on 28m. At the...