Samsung has recently announced a new, true 8-core Exynos processor ahead of the new processor from Apple called the A7. The company is likely trying to steal some of the spot light since Apple has just announced the new iPhone 5S and 5C models. The true 8-core processor might seem like it is nothing new because the current international models of the Samsung Galaxy S4 have the 8-core Exynos 5 process. The difference is the fact that with the Exynos 5, only four of the cores will be used at one time, whereas the true 8-core Exynos processor will have all 8-cores running together.
On current models of the Samsung handsets, the additional cores only fire up when the device is using high powered applications or doing more multitasking than a normal user would be doing. With the Exynos 5, the chipset has plenty of power and by powering down the cores that are not needed, Samsung was able to extend the battery life. With the new Exynos processor, the company is able to run all of the cores at the same time while still maintaining the important battery life and performance that Samsung users love about the smartphones.
According to Samsung, using the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Solution, it is able to a sizeable performance jump over the older “big.LITTLE” process, but has chosen to not comment on the amount of performance gain that users will be noticing. In the press release issued this week, Samsung noted the “HMP is the most powerful use model for ARM big.LITTLE technology, as it enables the use of all physical cores at the same time. Software threads with high priority or high computational intensity can be allocated to the ‘big’ Cortex-A15 cores while threads with less priority or are less computationally intensive, can be performed by the ‘LITTLE’ Cortex-A7 cores, enabling a highly responsive, low-energy system to be built.”
One possibility that remains unclear is whether the current Exynos 5 processors could get a software update that would allow them to power up the remaining 4 cores that are not in use at all times. Samsung release the Galaxy Note 3 which is powered by the Exynos 5 processor, while devices that are being launched in other LTE markets are powered by the Snapdragon 800, quad-core processor from Qualcomm.
