This is kinda what I was thinking. I don't know enough about low level hardware interaction to answer this, but I would think its logical to assume trade-offs.
I mean, could we really increase the number of cores, increase performance, and lower battery life all at once (lets assume battery technology stays the same for ten years and remains constant even though it wont)?
I was thinking adding cores would do little in raw performance other than making the phone more adaptable to different use cases (multi-processing certain apps/services) and better at doing nothing more efficiently (idle). But like I said, not a hardware guy. I would like to know how a chip with 48 cores compares to a chip with say 16 cores in terms of benchmarks. Surely with more cores each core is less powerful right?