Posted on Thursday, November 07 2013 @ 13:03 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
At an analyst event in South Korea, Samsung announced that it's working on a custom 64-bit processor. First the company will create a chip with ARM's 64-bit core but after that the company will reveal a chip with its own, ARM-compatible 64-bit core.
The biggest revelation is that Samsung is working on a custom CPU core. The core will be 64-bit, and it should be ARM-compatible like the custom cores in the latest Qualcomm and Apple SoCs. There's no timeline for its arrival, though. Samsung will apparently adopt ARM's existing 64-bit core before rolling out a custom solution of its own.
Although Samsung didn't discuss other details about its custom core, it did reveal some interesting information on through-silicon via (TSV) technology that allows memory and logic circuitry to be stacked on the same package. Samsung says it has "a real chip" that uses TSV and is running "all the software." That chip offers 14% better memory performance than LPDDR3 with 60% lower power consumption, the company says, and the next generation is supposed to boost the performance advantage to 30%. TSV makes a lot of sense for mobile processors, and I'm curious to see how quickly the tech can be deployed in Samsung SoCs.
Further details
at The Tech Report.
