When it came to technical specifications, Verizon's reveal of its new Motorola Droid lineup this morning was very creative, and not in a good way. The prime offender was the system-on-a-chip (SoC) at the heart of these phones, a chip dubbed the Motorola X8.

Let's start by calling out all the companies involved for their core-inflating duplicity: Motorola arrives at its "eight core" figure by taking the CPU cores, GPU cores, and a couple of coprocessors (one for "contextual computing" and one for voice processing) and lumping them all together. At best, this is misleading.

The first problem is that core count by itself is no better an indicator of actual performance than clock speed by itself—you need to know about the exact architectures involved, as well as figures like memory bandwidth, before you can even begin to make generalized assumptions about performance. Most regular people don't really make these distinctions, though—counting every single thing in the X8 SoC as a "core" to inflate that core count is a marketing tactic to make the phones seem more impressive than they are.

The second problem, of course, is that these different "cores" each perform dramatically different tasks. If the phone instead had four CPU cores and only two GPU cores, it would have the same total number of "cores" by Motorola's logic, but the real-world performance of the phone would be dramatically different. Some Googlers pulled a similar trick when the company launched the Nexus 7 last year, lumping the Tegra 3's four CPU cores and 12 individual GPU shaders together and saying that the tablet had "16 cores." If you know more about the details, you'll know that the new Droid Ultra is much faster than the Nexus 7, but these unhelpful inflated core counts make it sound like the reverse should be true.

Finally, let's talk about the underlying architecture. Motorola has said that the X8 is a custom chip, and there's no reason to doubt that that's true. What the X8 isn't, however, is a chip based on Motorola's own architecture or even its own design. Ars associate writer Casey Johnston got me a quick snap of a screen from the Android System Info app, and it lists the SoC's part number as MSM8960DT.

Those of you who follow this sort of thing will recognize that as a Qualcomm part number, specifically a slight variation on one of its existing Snapdragon S4 Pros (part number MSM8960T). That chip uses two Krait 200 1.7GHz CPU cores and an Adreno 320 GPU, and these specs line up exactly with the numbers that Verizon did announce, as well as their promised performance increases over the previous-generation Droid phones (24 percent faster CPU performance and twice the GPU performance of the outgoing Snapdragon S4 Plus in the Droid Razr HD). There's some speculation as to what the extra "D" in the part number indicates—some have suggested that it will exchange the Krait 200 CPU architecture for the slightly faster Krait 300, which seems logical given that otherwise a jump from 1.5GHz to 1.7GHz shouldn't give you 24 percent better performance.

At any rate, the Motorola X8 is more or less a Qualcomm Snapdragon.

That's not a bad thing—the Snapdragon lineup powers virtually every non-Apple, mid- to high-end smartphone in the US, and they've proven to be very capable performers. It just serves to further highlight the lack of useful technical information that Motorola and Verizon are giving out—not only is the "eight core" count a pointless and deceptive number, but the new processor that's powering the phones is in reality a gently tweaked version of a year-old SoC. To add insult to injury, all of this marketing-speak seems designed to cover up the fact that Motorola's SoC is still a fair bit slower than the Snapdragon 600s (and, soon, 800s) that are powering comparably priced high-end phones from the likes of Samsung, HTC, and LG.

This won't be the last we see of the MSM8960DT—it's widely rumored to be the chip powering the upcoming Moto X, which we'll be learning more about on August 1, if not before. Just know that if Motorola and Google pull the same marketing tricks at the Moto X reveal that Verizon helped them pull today, this is the chip that you're actually looking at.