Samsung also working on 'true octa-core' processor

A couple of days ago MediaTek announced it’s making the first ‘true octa-core’ processor, meaning that it will have a chip capable of having all eight processor cores running simultaneously. It was a big move for the Taiwanese chip maker that is enjoying growing popularity, but Samsung won’t just stand still and rumors have surfaced that it is also working on a ‘true octa-core’ processor.

Samsung already has the Exynos 5 Octa, but it uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture pairing 4 energy-efficient Cortex A7 cores and four extremely powerful Cortex A15 cores in a single setup. Yet this only allows four of the cores to work simultaneously.

There are no further details about this supposed new Samsung chip. If it all turns out to be true, though, 2014 might become the year of the ‘true octa-core’ chip.

We should however mention that simply raising the number of simultaneously active cores isn’t going to be a silver bullet solving all performance woes. Most applications simply won’t be optimized to use all those cores and it might be a good idea to actually focus on polishing per core architecture and performance. The other side of the argument is of course pure marketing. Octa-core sounds great to the average user on the ‘the more, the better’ principle, and companies are actively exploiting this.

Are you looking forward to octa-core chips?

source: Economic Daily via RBMen