Comments on: Samsung scoffs at quad-core, dials it up to 8 cores

By: Lucian Armasu

Lucian Armasu — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:58:42 +0000

Are you sure about that? Do you have a source for it? It sounds very unlikely to me that Samsung would force all 8 cores to work at once. And why would they? That doesn’t sound smart to me. I think they are just using regular big.Little with task migration between the two CPU clusters. That’s why I also get your from your source:

“To expand on the big.LITTLE concept, Warren East, chief executive officer, ARM, joined Woo on stage and introduced the new technology that has just become available in silicon through the Exynos 5 Octa. Housing a total of eight cores to draw from—four powerful Cortex-A15™ processors to handle processing-intense tasks along with four additional Cortex-A7™ cores for lighter workloads—the application processor offers maximum performance and up to 70 percent higher energy efficiency compared to the previous quad-core Exynos”

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:15:16 +0000

They are using big.Little MP. And yes, without power consumption info it’s hard to know how the chips will fall.

By: realjjj

realjjj — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:35:55 +0000

Unless they use big.LITTLE MP (and i highly doubt they are) , it’s a quad core since the 8 cores can’t be used at the same time and you shouldn’t propagate their false claim like this.
If they do use big.LITTLE MP ,power consumption would get out of hand but it’s unlikely that the software is ready for that anyway.
Samsung went the simple way here. Nvidia with an extra A15 core, TI with 2 extra M4 cores and without benchmarks it’s impossible to know who wins in power consumption and perf (not including Qualcomm because they use a different core so that’s even harder to guess).