Samsung's Galaxy S4 could feature not two, not four, not six, but a total of eight processor cores due to an upcoming chip.
According to EETimes, the technology company is working on a new processor utilizing ARM's big.little technology. As opposed to integrating a quad-core processor with a fifth core given the job of small background processes, Samsung plans to implement two powerful quad-core chips into one smartphone.
It's said that Samsung will couple four Cortex-A15 cores with four Cortex-A7s; the chips which are more powerful will predominately be used for highly demanding tasks.
The Cortex-A7 chips, which are the lower-powered batch of the chipsets, will be utilized once the load drops, leading to the more powerful A15-powered cores being turned off; subsequently, the less battery-dependent processors will deal with daily tasks performed by the user.
Samsung is reported to have started the production of the Galaxy S4's chip, while an official announcement of the device itself is set for CES 2013 in January.
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Zak Islam is a freelance writer focusing on security, networking, and general computing. His work also appears at Digital Trends and Tom's Guide.
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cats_Paw Somehow i feel the main problem of phones and tablets is the ram not the amount of cores.Reply -
cats_Paw nieurwhat zak?consecutive 2 articles contradicting each otherReply
Zak is just trolling...
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Sounds horrible :( I'm an S3 owner... I love everything about Samsung, they are my favourite brand alongside BMW.Reply
Why must they murder the phone's day to day tasks with slower performance than the phone is capable of , the main use of the phone is day-to-day tasks, and the gaming and performance are the extra, but now the day to day tasks get to be slower than the S3, for better app performance ? Sigh -
TunaSoda I thought the "S4" was the nickname for the dual core version in the states of the S3?Reply -
-Fran- This will be a useless overhead for many folks. Just rank up the price and copy nVidia's idea from Tegra 3.Reply
Stupid on Samsung's part. Instead of slamming "higher performing cores", slap the A15s and introduce better P and C states in them. I'm surprised they think this is a viable solution!
Cheers! -
helltag Eh it was only a matter of time until 8 cores were put into a mobile device, but for those who lack the foresight and vision one obvious task the extra processing power can be used for is AI such as Natural Language Processing (Google voice / siri).Reply
Or what, did you think 4 cores would be enough for everybody? -
Emperus Need more clarification on the so called "demanding tasks". 3DS Max lite version coming to Android! I guess not.Reply -
lengcaifai cpu in a phone...... oh excellent!!! smart phone!!!Reply
dual-core...... oh good!!! better multitasking and threaded performance!!!
quad-core...... hmm... desktop still can run most games well in dual-core... maybe for more future proofing?
AAAND HERES THE EIGHT CORE!!! ......