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.
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.
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!
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.
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"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."
not sure why 4 companion cores. Any task that uses 4 cores should be given 4 fast cores. And 90% of background tasks can be served by a single/double companion core.
The way ARM's big.LITTLE architecture works requires one A7 core for each A15 core. Processes migrate from the A7 cluster to the A15 cluster in a 1:1 fashion. Doesn't mean that all 4 cores are running all the time. And the switch between core clusters happens in a fraction of a second.
I don't think there is any task that requires 4 A15 cores running at the same time, excluding benchmarks. It would be both performance wasting and battery drainning.
May be samsung just wanna point out the word: Octa.
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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
arooj799 - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
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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."SetiroN - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
no.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
not sure why 4 companion cores. Any task that uses 4 cores should be given 4 fast cores.And 90% of background tasks can be served by a single/double companion core.
teejee - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
Having same number of cores means that you can easily share cache between A7 and A15 parts.I assume this is the reason.
phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
The way ARM's big.LITTLE architecture works requires one A7 core for each A15 core. Processes migrate from the A7 cluster to the A15 cluster in a 1:1 fashion. Doesn't mean that all 4 cores are running all the time. And the switch between core clusters happens in a fraction of a second.jerrylzy - Monday, January 28, 2013 - link
Why they didn't use 2 A7 cores and 2 A15 cores?I don't think there is any task that requires 4 A15 cores running at the same time, excluding benchmarks. It would be both performance wasting and battery drainning.
May be samsung just wanna point out the word: Octa.
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
For a phone, a dual-core big.LITTLE setup would be optimal, IMO.For a tablet, a quad-core big.LITTLE might make sense.
Granted, I'm using an Optimus G, which has a quad-core CPU. :)
gingerboy92 - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
it's all marketing. not much is making sense any more. i mean, 1080p? "octo" core? do we need all that?Techmister - Saturday, February 17, 2018 - link
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