Not to be outdone by the other new processor releases announced at CES 2013, notably by NVIDIAand Qualcomm, Samsung has announced its latest chip architecture: the Exynos 5 Octa. From the name you’d figure that the new SoC will feature eight cores, and for the most part you’d be correct. The eight cores are actually split into four powerful Cortex A15 cores (which has enough processing power to be used in Google’s 2560 x 1600 Nexus 10 tablet, and even the new Samsung Chromebook) and four power-efficient Cortex A7 cores, which form ARM’s new big.LITTLE architecture which is the alternative to NVIDIA’s 4+1 architecture found in the Tegra 3 chipset.
We’d heard that Samsung, among others, were indeed developing a new SoC based on this new architecture way back in November, and now it appears to be ready for the masses. Essentially, the Exynos 5 Octa distributes the basic everyday tasks such as using the browser to the slower but power-sipping A7 cluster, and more intensive processes such as games to the more powerful A15 cores.
Interestingly, the 28nm Exynos 5 Octa is set to be more powerful than the Exynos 5 Dual chips that power the Nexus 10 and Samsung Chromebook due to the two extra A15 cores, while still being more battery-friendly with the inclusion of the four A7 cores – making it the most powerful chip on the company’s roster…and also means that they will be perfect for use in next-gen smartphones. Moving on to pure speculation here, we might even be seeing this chip making an appearance on Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S IV flagship.
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