the dual-core processor in the iPhone 6 is the world's fastest mobile processor. Yes, you read that right. The A8 processor, which has two cores and runs at 1.4 GHz, in the iPhone 6 is faster than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805, which is the fastest smartphone processor available to Android phones, even when the Snapdragon 805 has four cores and runs at a speed of up to 2.7GHz.
The reason why Apple's dual-core processor beats all the four and eight core processors is because Apple has made the right choices (and right compromises) in designing its processors while in the world of Android, companies are just chasing after the core count.
To understand this keep the following in mind:
-- The processing power of a chip depends on a lot of factor. Core count and the speed are just two aspects of it.
-- More important aspects when it comes computing performance is memory bandwidth, latency and ability to execute threads in a more efficient way. This governs the instructions per cycle (IPC) that a processor can push put.
-- IPC depends on many aspects but it is not a given that high clock speed or more number of cores leads to better IPC.
Keeping this in mind, here is what is happening in the mobile world. Apple, which started designing its own processors with A5 in 2011 probably because it felt no other company was taking the right approach, is going after the IPC. Now IPC is something that sounds bad on a marketing brochure. The number of core sounds more sexier. So other companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek are focussed on increasing the number of cores even though it doesn't matter.
