Samsung is bringing a new mobile processor to the market, the first to implement ARM’s big.Little processing technology based on the Cortex-A15 CPU.
This technology pairs a ‘big’ ARM Cortex-A15 processor with a ‘LITTLE’ Cortex-A7 processor to create a system which can handle both high and low intensity tasks in the most energy efficient manner, ARM said.
“For example the performance capabilities of the Cortex-A15 processor can be utilized for heavy workloads, while the Cortex-A7 can take over to most efficiently process the majority of smartphone workloads”
The Exynos 5 Octa processor will draw from eight cores, four of the heavy duty Cortex-A15s and four Cortex-A7s for lighter workloads. Samsung said the processor offers up to 70% higher energy efficiency compared with the prior model.
The Exynos 5 Octa is the successor to the Dual, which Samsung said is already on board Google’s Chromebook and Nexus 10.
Samsung System LSI Business Device Solutions Division president Dr Stephen Woo said at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote address this week that the new processor was for high-end smart phones and tablets, running multiple applications.
What Mobile reported this week on NVidia’s new Tegra 4, the next generation of Tegra processors, also announced at CES, which again uses Cortext-A15s in a quad-core configuration with a Geforce GPU (graphics processing unit) that sports 72 cores. NVidia claimed this made it six times faster than the Tegra 3, already in phones such as the HTC One X and the Nexus 7 tablet.
Dr Woo also introduced Samsung’s green memory solutions, which with solid state drives and advanced DRAM helped the management of power consumption in data centers. Samsung said that, compared with traditional data centres with hard disk drives, server and storage solutions with green memory increased the data-processing speeds six-fold while operating at 26% less electricity.
The key note also made mention of Samsung’s prototype flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, covered in What Mobile’s story. For some reason dubbed “YOUM” by Samsung (“Yea, an Obtuse and Undulating Material!”), this is a flexible display using thin plastic instead of glass which makes it bendable and, Samsung says, virtually unbreakable. Senior vice president of display Brian Berkeley reportedly showed a prototype with a curved edge that showed contiguous content along its side
“Our team was able to make a high resolution display on extremely thin plastic instead of glass, so it won’t break even if it’s dropped. This new form factor will really begin to change how people interact with their devices, opening up new lifestyle possibilities … [and] allow our partners to create a whole new ecosystem of devices.”