Samsung announces true octa-core for its Exynos chips
After teasing it earlier, Samsung has unveiled the latest refresh to its Exynos 5 chipsets. Bringing what the Koreans call Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP), the new Exynos 5 Octa big.LITTLE chip (that powers the likes of its Galaxy S4 flagship) can now run on all of its cores simultaneously. This comes after criticisms from rival chipmakers that the Exynos 5410 and 5420 can"t be considered true octa-core SoCs.
HMP will give the chipset the ability to use the cores in any desired combination. Until now you could either have four low-power Cortex-A7 cores for low priority tasks, or the four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores for high priority tasks.
Samsung hopes to deploy the new Exynos 5 Octa big.LITTLE HMP solution in Q4 of this year. The company has remained mum on whether that means existing big.LITTLE chips will get that capability via a software update, though, or if it only applies to upcoming Exynos 5 products.
