News Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa to hit OEMs this summer

Still on a Samsung Galaxy SII which is brilliant, I think I will be upgrading to the SIV, it looks so packed when it comes to features.
Watching the release live stream was pure agony though, like a theatre play.

 

Wouldn't using just 4 A15 cores and down-volting them be just as effective but a lot less complicated and less expensive? I never got the impression that A15 was THAT much more power consuming than A7 - it still has a better performance-per-watt ratio than many Intel Atoms, possibly all Atoms.

Also, I personally consider web browsing to be a relatively stressful task for ARM processors when you consider the amount of vector graphics involved. While 4 A7 cores can obviously handle that, I think 2 A15 cores would handle web browsing better.

 

I think you'll find it will be a lot more efficient to use a more optimised set of silicone. For the same reason the average i7 rig couldn't be undervolted and used in a digital watch. You use low performance - low power chips for low performance jobs.

I'd be more concerned that it will result in laggy web experience etc and only kick in the extra ooomph when it really needs to. It all depends on how dynamic the switching is.

 

No I totally get that, but my point is I never heard of A15 being that much more power consuming than its predecessors. I feel like you can easily and safely under-volt and under-clock it to match A7 without weird performance issues like lagging. However, unless Samsung just has incompetent engineers, they must have already thought of and tested my idea. Also, I suppose I could be talking out of my ass anyways since I have never seen tests on A7. I've seen tests and used A8 and A9, but not A7. So A7 could be more power efficient than I expect.

 

This is the first A15 chip thats been put into a phone and samsung have had to make a bigger battery for that phone to compensate for it.

In the mobile space battery life is key.

 

Was waiting for the S4 to be released etc before I upgraded my phone and then after watching a few videos etc on it and finding most companies want a deposit for it, I have decided not to bother with it just yet.

I have decided to go for a Galaxy Note 2 instead.

Whilst the S4 is better, I just don't see why a phone need's a 8 core chip and seems pointless and a waste of money to me.

 

Perhaps, I was not drawn to the processor but really to the larger screen, the better resolution, those kinds of things. I'm sure it will be quite expensive though.

 

A7 is *really* efficient.

A7 has a short pipeline, in order execution and quite narrow instruction issue. A15 is out of order, has a much deeper pipeline and quite complex out of order execution. This means that A7 is physically much smaller, so uses much less static power and much less dynamic power for an easy workload. However, because of its shorter pipeline you can't clock it as high. A15 will give you far higher performance when it's running at the same speed, but it'll use even more power. Samsung have said their implementation gives 3.8mm² for A7 and 19mm² for A15. That's a huge difference! Power gating the A15 when it's idle makes all that power consumption go away.

Also, I do feel like you're talking out of your arse All CPU architectures get diminishing returns for increasing performance. I recently saw a comparison of an i7 and a Tegra 3. The i7 was 8x as fast in single threaded tests, but used 25x as much power. I'd be surprised if you could find a counter-example!

 

2,650x1,600 (WXGA) ?!!?

Should be 2,560x1,600 (WXGA) !