Aka this phone?

http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_(m8 )-6074.php

Note you need to remove the space after m8 and before ) or use the link I gave below.

Well pretty much any phone that costs $200 or more today will beat it, and lots of phones are very nice for $200 or more. You do not need to buy a $600 to $800 phone to get a good one.

Even the phones that use the "budget cortex a53" hardware will beat your HTC One M8 as long as that a53 is listed at 1.8 ghz or higher (it does not matter how many cores the cortex a53 has.)

Pretty much you should ignore the rest of the post for it is tech spec BLAH that will drive you more insane than Cthulhu entering this universe

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Well most phones now beat the HTC One M8. Now some phone guts especially in the budget / cheap market, the soc and cpu use standard off the shelf "cheap" processors that are budget and the goal is not to have the fastest silicon out there but instead a cheap silicon that does not cost a lot to make in order to keep margins high when you are selling a budget phone.

Well Cortex a53 is the "standardized" cpu core created from an UK soc design company known as ARM (Acorn RISC Machines, the British Apple it is sometimes nicknamed as.)

ARM has many cpu designs. They offer two ways to build a cpu chip. You can use one of their standardized designs and they have "slow budge models" and also "faster more expensive models" or you can "rent the CPU design language and make your own SoC that works on the ARM language and thus could be an Android Phone, an iPhone, etc.

Well the cortex a53 is the standardized designed for budget phones and budget purposes, and its been this way since late 2014 when you started to see phones using cortex A53. The A53 is designed for budget performance. To get faster than budget performance you have two options.

1) The cpu company like Qualcomm, Samsung etc creates a custom cpu that works on the "ARM Language" but is designed from scratch for example Qualcomm Kyro used in the Snapdragon 820 and the Samsung Exynos 8895 which use the M2 cpu core

2) They use a standard ARM Core but pay more for ARM makes faster cpus than the cortex A53 and instead of using the a53 they use one of the faster models known as the Cortex A57, Cortex A72, or Cortex A73 and so on.

Remember Aka Cortex A53 is budget. Not bad but not great.

But even though Cortex A53 is budget and has been used since late 2014 we have faster Cortex A53s in 2016 and 2017 than what they had in 2014. This is due to newer cpu silicon factories that can make the same silicon they used to make but run it at a faster ghz clockspeed.

You have to be careful when you look at phones with cpus listed as cortex a53, This is because some of the budget phones have cortex a53s at 1 ghz, 1.4 ghz, 1.5 ghz, 2.0 ghz, and so on. The amount of cores they have does not really matter but the 2.0 ghz models are faster than the 1.0 ghz models.

Well the cortex a53 at 2.0 ghz or 1.8 ghz will be faster than your current cell phone as long as you also have 2 gbs of ram. So because technology gets cheaper day after day you can now even get a cortex a53 that is faster than your HTC One M8 from 2014 which in 2014 that was using the latest and greatest cpu cores. Effectively merely increasing the GHZ has made the budget cpu now compete with the highe end from 3 years ago. To use an analogy / metaphor it is like buying an Intel Celeron from today and having it be faster than an Intel Core i3 or i5 from 5 years ago or a core 2 duo from 10 years ago and so on.

Aka this is good for you Nossy. Good tech is now cheap, Budget cheap is cheap and not pure sucky but actually kind of nice.

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So remember if the cortex a53 is 1.8 ghz or higher it is faster than your phone. If the phone has a cortex a57, a72, a73 it is also faster than your phone. If it does not use a cortex derived hardware (not A53, A72, A73, and so on) just send me a private noteboard and I will tell you if its good or not, or make another RAFO post. 9/10 chance though it will be faster than your flagship 2014 hardware.

If the SoC CPU is listed as Snapdragon 650, 652, 653, 660, 820, 821, 835 it is faster than your phone.