HTC One A9 Benchmarks Allege Deca-Core SoC And 4GB RAM

Where our smartphones are concerned, it feels like we're in the middle of a "megapixel race" kind of situation, one where companies continue to beef up specs to almost ridiculous heights, all without providing a tangible real-world benefit. We talked about this just the other day, when Samsung unveiled new 12Gb memory chips that could give upcoming smartphones a staggering 6GB of RAM.

With RAM, the fact Apple continues to pack its high-end iPhones with only 1GB of the stuff suggests that 4GB in a mere smartphone could very well be overkill, or at least inefficient use of it. We're just not seeing real-world scenarios yet where that extra memory is needed, unless of course you want to point to an inefficient OS. But as hard as it is to grasp why companies are packing so much RAM into these devices, we can think the same thing about the processors. Many phones today pack in 8 cores under-the-hood, and we're largely left to question why.

But not HTC, it seems. Nope - if leaks are correct, it'd appear the Taiwan-based vendor isn't interested in settling on a mere 8 cores. Instead, its rumored A9 smartphone, based on a leaked benchmark, includes 10 cores under its hood. This chip is based on ARM's MT6797, and is clocked at about 2GHz. With a performance rating of 1835 single-thread and 5884 multi-thread, it does seem that all of those CPU cores can be utilized in some benchmarks. For comparison, the eight-core OnePlus 2 scores 4488 in the multi-thread test.

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that the phone also includes 4GB of RAM. Given its overall capabilities, we can hope it might have a super-fast camera, as well. If those capabilities prove correct, that is.