It is possible to get data from Android about how much it has used it core in the processor. For those who are technically minded, the information can be found in the /proc/stat file. I wrote a tool which grabs the per core usage information from Android while an app is running. To increase the efficiency, and lessen the performance hit of the monitoring, the data is only collect while the test app is active. The analysis of the collected data is done “off-line.”
Using this tool, which doesn’t have a name yet, I ran a series of different types of apps (gaming, web browsing etc) on a phone with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and again on a phone with an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor. I have collated the data from these test runs and with the help of Android Authority’s Robert Triggs, I have generated some graphs which show how the processor is being used.