Eight Core Samsung Exynos 5 Octa CPU Demonstrated at CES

Samsung today took the wraps off an 8-core processor known as the Exynos 5 Octa.

Stephen Woo, president of Samsung’s System LSI business, said during a keynote address here at CES that the Exynos 5 Octa will offer a “level of pure processing power never before seen in a mobile device.”

The Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core SoC destined for tablets and high-end smartphones.

Not all of these CPU cores are created equal: four of them are high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, the very same found in the Exynos 5 Dual that powers the Nexus 10 and Samsung’s ARM Chromebook. The other four are Cortex-A7 CPU cores—these have the same feature set and capabilities as the A15 cores, but are optimized for power efficiency rather than performance.

This makes the Exynos 5 Octa one of the first products to actually use ARM’s big.LITTLE processor switching technology. The SoC is designed to dynamically split the workload between the high-performance and the high-efficiency CPU cores based on the task at hand—less strenuous activities like browsing an app store or checking e-mail might be done on the A7 cores, for instance, while gaming and number crunching could be handed off to the A15 cores.

Both sets of cores are said to work in tandem together and offer great speeds without compromising on battery consumption.This differs from Nvidia’s Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 SoCs, which include a low-power Cortex-A9 and a Cortex-A15 (respectively) “companion core” that can only be used when all of the SoC’s other CPU cores are powered down

The new SoC will be manufactured using a 28nm process as opposed to the 32nm process used by the Exynos 5 Dual, hence claiming to be more power-efficient. According to Samsung, the SoC can deliver twice the performance of quad-core Exynos CPUs, while using 70 percent less power.

What Samsung has not yet revealed is when the first devices running the Exynos 5 Octa will be available on the market, nor at what cost.