Posted on Wednesday, November 21 2012 @ 14:10 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Samsung announced it will reveal a new quad-core mobile processor using ARM's Big.Little concept at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in mid-February 2013. The technology is similar to NVIDIA Tegra 3's "4-PLUS-1", it matches a low-power cores with high-performance cores to achieve lower power consumption. Samsung's chip will be made using 28nm HKMG process technology, it will feature ARM Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores.
What remains to be seen is whether the new system-on-chip will have four cores in total (or two clusters with two Cortex-A15 cores per one cluster and two Cortex-A7 cores per another cluster), or eight cores (or two clusters with four Cortex-A15 cores per one cluster and four Cortex-A7 core per another cluster).
One of today’s technology most significant challenges is how to create a system-on-chip (SoC) that meets the conflicting consumer demand for devices with both higher-performance and extended battery life. ARM’s Big.Little processing approach achieves this by pairing the best of the high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore and ultra-efficient ARM Cortex-A7 processors. Big.Little processing combines two different, but compatible processors within the same SoC and allows the power management software to seamlessly select the right processor, or multiple processors, for the right task.
Source: X-bit Labs
