The best 'cheap' phone that was ever released in the US was the $499 Google Nexus 6P by Huawei in 2015. It was an octa-core phone that made Apple's dual core iPhone 6s (also released in 2015) look like an overpriced joke. The 6P's aluminum body was lighter and thinner than the iPhone 6s, its camera took much better pictures _by far_ especially in low light conditions (restaurants, evening travel, etc), the iPhone's o…
The iPhone 6s gets a single-core Geekbench of 528 while the Nexus 6P gets 208. The Nexus 6P's multi-core score was 520 - less then the iPhone 6s' single-core score. The iPhone 6s' multi-core score was 970 - 87% higher than the Nexus 6P.
Yep, it had 8 cores. Good for it. It was still a lot slower.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9820/the-google-nexus-6p-revi...
AnandTech also found it a lot slower. Mozilla's Kraken web browser benchmark took 2.4x longer on the Nexus 6P. The iPhone scored around 1.9x higher on Google's Octane benchmark.
It's really hard to argue with Apple's superior processor performance. I guess if you're looking for more cores with inferior performance, the Nexus 6P fits the bill. MORE CORES!