Samsung unveiled an eight-core mobile processor during their keynote at CES that uses a unique design to boost performance across the board without increasing battery life demands. The Exynos 5 Octa features a high-end quad-core processor for CPU-intensive tasks like gaming alongside a midrange quad-core chip geared more towards e-mail and texting, according to president of Samsung Electronics' component business Stephen Woo.
The package contains four Cortex-A15 cores on the high end and four Cortex A7 cores for more mundane tasks, using ARM's big.Little architecture to make everything play together nicely. All said and done, Samsung claims the chip is 70 percent more efficient with regards to energy consumption compared to current designs.
A reference design of the Exynos 5 Octa was able to load a restaurant's webpage, download an app to place a reservation and pull up the device's location using GPS all at the same time. In another demonstration, Woo showcased the chip running a 3D-based video game albeit not without an awkward hiccup at the beginning that stalled the game for roughly 30 seconds.
As you might expect, the eight-core chip will be destined for high-end smartphones and tablets and is expected to compete with Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor and Qualcomm's 800 series chips. Both of those chips are scheduled for release sometime in the second half of this year, although the Korean electronics giant didn't say when their new Exynos chip would be ready for production.