[inversionOf]

The 808 is also a big little architecture, with two A57 cores and four A53 cores. The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings.

As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs will be worth it right there. Losing OIS...I don't think that's a downgrade as OIS was always suspect to begin with (not least because OIS only helps for lateral movements. It does nothing for rotational movements, and of course make subjects stand still. It yielded a tonne of unusable photos).

The only thing I'm really displeased about is the removal of wireless charging. That was a really nice feature.

Between the Snapdragon 810 and 808, the only real items of concern is that the 808 does not have h265 hardware encoding (the 810 does), and its image processing DSP is 12-bit per pixel rather than the 14-bpp of the 810.

[DannyBee]

"The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings."

non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers.

There reason why is pretty simple.

In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips.

If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK.

Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.

[inversionOf]

You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload".

Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question.

An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.