I think was in that topic, justifying why Apple is influential in the games industry, but shouldn’t be anywhere near the top.
The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S have a dual core CPU and a very good dual core GPU. The CPU used in a fair amount of other phones, but Apple under clock it on the iPhone down to 800Mhz and on the iPad to 1Ghz. It is clocked much higher on other phones. You see, Apple do a lot of stuff on the GPU, they pretty much do all the UI rendering on the GPU and that is something Android hasn’t had all that well until recently, ICS allows you to force it across the entire system iirc.
The most intensive things we do on phones these days are pretty much, gaming and perhaps a bit of video editing, but mainly gaming. We shouldn’t need these insanely quick CPUs, I mean they should progress but if anything has proven we don’t need these really quick CPUs for the most intensive thing we do on a phone, it is the iPhone.
Just look at the benchmarks, especially the bottom graphics benchmarks.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/489?vs=448
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/503?vs=448
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/531?vs=448
All those phones are considerably larger than the iPhone, have bigger batteries with more capacity. They should be able to pull out a lead on battery life. Basically, we can afford to slow down the CPU - put better GPUs in them and let them do more of the work when they are in situations when they can do it better. I know the iPhone doesn’t go down particularly well around here, but this approach is one I think could benefit Android phones. I think WP7 is similar to iOS in regards to this approach.
The problem is, Android manufacturers are desperate to differentiate themselves from each other. None of them are really software companies, they can’t make good software, their skins aren’t a real differentiator to the average consumer - they wouldn’t really notice. What they can notice and process though, is big numbers on the spec sheet next to the phone! So that is what they do, they play the spec race. That is the main way they can differentiate themselves - putting faster components into the phones well before the battery tech has caught up.
TL;DR - We don’t need quad core CPUs, the software to properly support the hardware to give the performance hardware manufacturers want to boast about. But that is still unlikely to slow it down because of the need for differentiation. The most intensive thing we do is games, FOCUS ON THE GPUs!