Samsung Announces Exynos 5 Octa SoC - 4 Cortex A7s, 4 Cortex A15s
by Brian Klug on January 9, 2013 4:58 PM EST- Posted in
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- exynos 5 octa
Earlier this morning Samsung announced a new eight core SoC and the spiritual successor to the Exynos 5250 "Exynos 5 Dual" called the Exynos 5 Octa (Exynos 5410?). This new SoC combines four ARM Cortex A15s and four ARM Cortex A7s, which is pretty much ARM's exact big.LITTLE reference design designed to enable either context hotplugging between the lower power, lower performance A7s and the higher power, higher performance A15s. GPU as far as I know remains a Mali T-6xx series, I'm not certain which one, however. We're now hearing that the Exynos 5 Octa may actually include an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX GPU - we're trying to confirm this asap. Update: It's a PowerVR SGX 544MP3.
This entire SoC is being built on Samsung's new 28nm HK-MG process, as opposed to the 32nm HK-MG process for Exynos 5 Dual and Exynos 4 successors. This half node shrink should offer a die size and space savings, but obviously not nearly as much as a full node, likely on the order of 15% based on Samsung's own diagram. No word quite yet on clocks.
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brozono - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
Exynos 4 Octa should be Exynos 5 Octa in the first sentence.Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
This sounds like fun. I hope they get better power numbers than the Dual-Exynos Anand tested in the Nexus 10.jjj - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
I doubt that they are using all cores at the same time (yet) so way to mislead people with the Octa name.It is nice to have another quad A15 even if it's gonna be Samsung devices only.
cmikeh2 - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
From what I've read about big.LITTLE it's impossible to have more than four cores running at once since the kernel will see each pair of cores as a single logical core.coder543 - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
It depends. Look at Page 7: http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/big_LITTLE_Fina...cmikeh2 - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
Thanks. Didn't know that.shervinemami - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
ARM's big.LITTLE only allows 4 cores to run at any moment. Page 7 of that document doesn't say that you can actually use 8 cores, it only says that the memory interconnect system is designed to handle the full use of 4 x Cortex-A15s and/or 4 x Cortex-A7s but this doesn't mean the CPU will actually do this. The whole point of big.LITTLE is to to *increase* battery life by allowing a quad-core system to switch between high-power A15's and low-power A7's. It certainly doesn't allow running 8 cores at the same time, that would seriously lower battery life!phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
big.LITTLE MP allows you to use all cores at once (A7 and A15); although it requires some major changes to the OS scheduler to support this mode (asynchronous MP).It's highly unlikely that the first ever big.LITTLE implementation would be big.LITTLE MP.
However, we'll all have to wait until someone actually gets their hands on a unit to do an in-depth review/analysis of it.
Also, Samsung's press release only mentions big.LITTLE, not big.LITTLE MP:
http://www.samsung.com/us/news/20353
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kpb321 - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
"This new SoC combines four ARM Cortex A15s and four ARM Cortex A7s, which is pretty much ARM's exact big.LITTLE reference design designed to enable either context hotplugging between the lower power, lower performance A7s and the higher power, higher performance A15s." Seems like it should have something like "or running all 8 cores simultaneously to enable higher performance."