Samsung Exynos 5 Octa Processors Will Soon Use All 8 Cores Simultaneously

Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processors have thus far been of a variety that allows for four of the eight cores to be used at one time. This will no longer be the reality beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, however, with Samsung announcing that with the use of Heterogeneous Multi-Processing the Exynos 5 Octa will be able to use all eight cores at once.

Thus far, the Exynos 5 Octa has worked with eight cores split into two groups, one of those groups being lower-powered offerings and the second group being higher powered. Depending on needs, either the lower-powered cores or the higher-powered cores are used, and as such the Exynos 5 Octa functions essentially as a quad-core processor.

This will change soon, however, with Samsung using Heterogeneous Multi-Processing technology to allow for all eight cores to be used at the same time, making it a "true" octa-core processor. Such will work via a software implementation that pushes the more intensive tasks to the more powerful cores and the lower priority tasks to the lesser powerful cores.

Such is the general premise behind it. Said Samsung's System LSI Marketing Vice President Taehoon Kim: "It's usually assumed that the big CPU will do all the performance-critical work, however, power-efficient little cores can handle many significant workloads all on their own, so the workload is balanced within the system."

This change will allow Samsung to take better advantage of big.LITTLE, with HMP said to be the "most powerful use model" for the ARM technology. To represent it in a more visual way, Samsung has included an "OCTA-pella" one-man-band music video with its announcement, which you can check out above.

SOURCE: Android Community