Tuesday, November 20th 2012
Samsung to Unveil 4+4 Core big.LITTLE Processor in 2013
Samsung is reportedly taking interest in ARM's big.LITTLE technology - an SoC design in which high-performance Cortex-A15 cores are combined by low-power Cortex-A7 cores, and the two are made to trade places as the device's CPU, depending on the load. An SoC slated for 2013, which could probably feature in high-end smartphones and tablets, sees a combination of four each of A15 and A7 cores. The A15 cores are clocked at 1.80 GHz, and A7 at 1.20 GHz, with the former featuring higher IPC than the latter. A 2 MB last-level cache serves as town-square for data and instructions going to the various cores. The chip will be built on the 28 nm process.
Source:
EETimes
11 Comments on Samsung to Unveil 4+4 Core big.LITTLE Processor in 2013
Samsung: 4 + 4
Who's next? Qualcomm: 8 + 8?
:D
IMO, this architecture makes no sense. What a waste of silicon real estate. And the complexity of schedule and CPU management is going to take overhead and will never be optimal.
The smart thing to do would be to have the A15 cores drop from 1.8Ghz to 400Mhz or slower, and to be able to purge and shrink the cache to save power. I guess the problem is that Intel hold patents on this technology and ARM wants designs that work on regular silicon not requiring ultra-low leakage gates which are probably very expensive since the new fabs are full to capacity.
And possibly Ios
Not sure about windows RT.