Although we may be reaching a point where smartphones have plateaued in terms of what they can offer users from a “power” standpoint with even mid-tier devices likely capable enough of handling the majority of chores thrown at them, that is not stopping chip manufacturers from ramping up their race to be king of the hill. The latest move, hinted at a couple days ago, comes from Samsung which has released some videos showing their Exynos 5420 Octa chips running all eight cores at once. Samsung calls this Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP). Up until now, the big.LITTLE architecture that Samsung has used could only handle four of the ARM processors running at any given time.
Going up against Samsung and their Exynos chips is MediaTek, which earlier this year announced they were going to produce a new octa-core processor before the end of the year that can actually use all eight cores at the same time. Meanwhile, Qualcomm appears to be on a slightly different path as shown by a video they released targeting MediaTek's plans. In that video, they stress the importance of coming up with better chips rather than just throwing a whole lot of chips in a mobile device. Since the Exynos 5420 Octa continues to use the same ARM cores, it seems the same criticism would apply.
The videos that have been released actually come from ARM and show three different “real world” scenarios and how running all eight cores will impact those types of uses. Check them out below.
Processing Angry Birds
Processing QuickOffice
GPU Compute Demo
source: phoneArena
What kind of gpu has this thing got?