You might not remember the ARM Cortex-A53 -- other ARMv8 instruction-set chips have perhaps graced your life in recent years -- but it's probably the most-shipped general-purpose CPU core design of recent years. And billions of users have them in their phones.
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Does the A53 suck? Depends. SoC vendors *could* grace it with 2MiB of cache. But nobody who produces an A53-based device today does that. Low-end means corner cutting, and nobody's advertising cache sizes. Meanwhile, "quad-core" and "octa-core" sure do get bandied about.
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What's going on there? Well, device manufacturers are assuming that punters don't understand the nuances of chip architecture and design (sacré bleu!) and instead buy parts with headline numbers they can put on the box. Cores are easily countable, turns out.
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Quality...real-world performance...those are the sorts of things that take investigation and get detailed at the high-end. Tech journalists give roughly zero attention to the budget end of the market. Everyone not choosing between a Galaxy S or Pixel or iPhone is on their own.
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The predictable consequence is that dozens of wildly successful models get introduced worldwide every year to basically no marketing support or press interest. Why? Low margins. No manufacturer will independently bring their low-margin device to the attention of a journalist.
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If the last decade has taught us anything, it's our tech press will fawn endlessly over high-end geegaws that will marginally improve wealthy lives, while entirely neglecting the ways in which tech is actaully transforming (for better and worse) the live of the less-well-heel'd.
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The Verge, Gizmodo, C|Net, etc....they're basically TopGear. But we expect that now. The truly unconscionable failures are in traditional media that have tried to grow tech beats.
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Anyway, the NYT's (et al's) failure to look -- to *really look* -- at the experiences of the median American phone user aside, the A53 is with us for the next decade. Count on it.
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Do you build websites? Run 'em on phones with A53s inside. You'll be glad (and, initially, sad) you did.
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On French Amazon, Nokia 2 is more expensive than 2.1 and 2.2…
I’ll get a 2.1 -
Good call! The 2.1 is some hot, hot (literally hot) 28nm-process garbage: https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_2_1-9216.php …
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