Samsung to Unveil 4+4 Core big.LITTLE Processor in 2013

[btarunr]

Samsung is reportedly taking interest in ARM's big.LITTLE technology - an SoC design in which high-performance Cortex-A15 cores are combined by low-power Cortex-A7 cores, and the two are made to trade places as the device's CPU, depending on the load. An SoC slated for 2013, which could probably feature in high-end smartphones and tablets, sees a combination of four each of A15 and A7 cores. The A15 cores are clocked at 1.80 GHz, and A7 at 1.20 GHz, with the former featuring higher IPC than the latter. A 2 MB last-level cache serves as town-square for data and instructions going to the various cores. The chip will be built on the 28 nm process.



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[chodaboy19]

nVidia: 4 + 1
Samsung: 4 + 4

Who's next? Qualcomm: 8 + 8?

 

[micropage7]

pretty interesting and for short time handheld stuff will have more power than pc but eat less battery

 

[Completely Bonkers]

A 2 MB last-level cache serves as town-square for data

Which PR "guru" thinks up this nonsense!

IMO, this architecture makes no sense. What a waste of silicon real estate. And the complexity of schedule and CPU management is going to take overhead and will never be optimal.

The smart thing to do would be to have the A15 cores drop from 1.8Ghz to 400Mhz or slower, and to be able to purge and shrink the cache to save power. I guess the problem is that Intel hold patents on this technology and ARM wants designs that work on regular silicon not requiring ultra-low leakage gates which are probably very expensive since the new fabs are full to capacity.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Which PR "guru" thinks up this nonsense!

IMO, this architecture makes no sense. What a waste of silicon real estate. And the complexity of schedule and CPU management is going to take overhead and will never be optimal.

The smart thing to do would be to have the A15 cores drop from 1.8Ghz to 400Mhz or slower, and to be able to purge and shrink the cache to save power. I guess the problem is that Intel hold patents on this technology and ARM wants designs that work on regular silicon not requiring ultra-low leakage gates which are probably very expensive since the new fabs are full to capacity.

Can they not power gate like x86? Intel and AMD shut down entire cores, I believe some off core things, and even parts of the cache itself now.

 

[NutZInTheHead]

wtf I posted in wrong thread. lol

 

[Morgoth]

ican see it allready just like in the 1990 intel and amd buying every arm producer out

 

[3870x2]

wtf I posted in wrong thread. lol

There is a delete button at the bottom of your post if you edit.

 

[tacosRcool]

Now which mobile operating system will take full advantage of the extra cores? It's fine and all that there are more cores but if nothing takes advantage of them, they only look nice on paper.

 

[suraswami]

hmm desktops dying... how are we going to manage all the landfill?

 

[Syborfical]

Now which mobile operating system will take full advantage of the extra cores? It's fine and all that there are more cores but if nothing takes advantage of them, they only look nice on paper.

Android. Being based of linux the more cores you throw at it the better the system should run.... Not sure why you would need 4 or more for a mobile device ....
And possibly Ios

Not sure about windows RT.

 

[WarEagleAU]

the only thing I like about this is saving battery (like on my SGS2 hopeful to replace with SGS3 or Note2) and still having power to go. Of course, having them power gate would be nice but they could also have those 4 cores help out the GPU and have super graphics and processing