If you're reading this, the odds are pretty good that you have a smartphone. There's also a better-than-average chance that you know a little something about the stuff inside that phone—who makes the chips inside and how those chips stack up to the ones in other phones.

About a year ago, we wrote a guide covering most of the major players making these chips, and now that this year's Mobile World Congress is over and done with, we thought it was time to revisit the subject. What's changed? What's stayed the same? And what's going to happen in the next year that you need to know about?

We'll begin by looking at emerging trends before moving on to a bird's-eye view of where all the major chipmakers stand. This won't give you an in-depth technical description of every detail, but it should help you understand where this tech is headed in 2014.

Moar cores! A MHz race for the modern era

Back in the late '90s and early 2000s, if you wanted to make people look at your new computers and processors, the thing to do was to slap a big, impressive-sounding clock speed number on it. This phenomenon, often called the "MHz race," saw AMD, and especially Intel, prioritize clock speed in their CPU designs over all else, even when it caused problems.

The then-record-breaking 1.13GHz Pentium III chip was unstable enough to be removed from the market later; the Pentium 4 was designed to hit 10GHz clock speeds even though it was even slower clock-for-clock than the architecture that preceded it. It seemed like every marginal 33MHz speed bump was trumpeted from the rooftops, and this war didn't really recede until Intel hit a wall with the Pentium 4—it got so hot that it never got past 4GHz, less than half of what was originally promised.

There's a bit of a MHz race going on in smartphone chips these days (chipmakers only trumpet their SoCs' maximum clock speeds, not the speeds at which they can actually run for more than a couple of minutes ), but the real lunacy is about core counts. There are chips that haveCPU cores of varying performance levels, and they're marketed that way even when no more than four can be active at once. A few more of these chips were just announced at Mobile World Congress last month.

More problematic are the companies that play fast-and-loose with core counts in an effort to make their processors look and sound more appealing. There's Motorola's "X8 Computing System," which gets to eight "cores" by adding two CPU cores, four GPU cores, and two entirely unrelated co-processors. There's Nvidia's new Tegra K1, which brags that it has 192 GPU cores without also telling you that an Nvidia "core" is not a Qualcomm "core" or an Intel "core" or an Imagination Technologies "core."

Like MHz and GHz in the late 2000s, core counts have become a prominent marketing bullet point, at least among certain enthusiasts. And just like MHz and GHz, "core count" is completely useless as a performance metric when divorced from all contextual information. We can't wait to see what companies count as "cores" in the next year—is an LTE modem a core? Is each individual pixel on the screen a core? Am I a core? Are you?

The high end cools down while the midrange heats up

Conventional wisdom says the market for high-end smartphones is nearing a ceiling, and whether that’s true or not there are all kinds of signs that it’s not growing like it was in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Glowing reviews and quick updates couldn’t save HTC’s One from middling sales. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 sold better, but they’ve tailed off in recent quarters according to thisreport. ARM's last financial report said that high-end sales had slowed, and since ARM has a hand in virtually every chip in every iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry phone and tablet, it's in a position to know.

To keep growing, ARM and others are turning to cheaper phones, and many of 2013's most interesting phones came in well under the $600 that many flagships cost unsubsidized. Consider the Moto G, an admittedly no-frills Android phone that nevertheless brings good build quality, performance, and battery life for less than $200 unlocked. Nokia's Lumia 620 and 520 fill a similar niche in the Windows Phone ecosystem. Chip companies are helping Motorola, Nokia, and others in this strategy, trying to draw more attention to their mid-tier processors than they have in the past.

These inexpensive phones don’t inspire excitement exactly. But while it seems like the highest of the high-end flagships change less every year, the amount of phone that you can get for less than $200 is increasing rapidly. Who’s to say what $180 will buy you next year? Or $60? Or $25? These are the kinds of problems more tech companies should be trying harder to solve—more "how do we get this incredible technology to people who can't even imagine it today?" and less "how can we make SnapChat a little bit faster for teens in the 'burbs?"

Here comes the co-processor

Last time, we discussed the trend toward tighter integration in both PC and mobile processors. As time has gone on, more and more functionality has been worked into fewer and fewer chips, thereby enabling smaller and lighter devices.

Since then, we've actually seen some companies take steps in the other direction, at least for certain functions. Two of the Moto X's "cores" are actually co-processors that handle the always-on voice controls and the "active notifications" feature. The iPhone 5S and both of 2013's iPads all include a small "M7" co-processor used to process data from the phone's various sensors. And Google's "Project Tango" concept phone uses a separate co-processor called the "Myriad 1" to process the images coming in from its Kinect-esque 3D camera setup.

These co-processors all serve different purposes, but the idea behind each of them is the same. They all perform extremely specific, dedicated functions, and they're all meant to keep the main SoC from turning on and burning through a bunch of power. These co-processors also help the devices they're in stand out from other phones and tablets running the same (or similar) chips, which is especially important to Android OEMs trying to convince people that their Android phone is better than everyone else's extremely similar Android phones.