The Android Lollipop fanfare is all well and good today, but what about the other guys? Well, Samsung published some interesting new information on their latest processor. The new family of processors come under the Exynos name and in the octa category, but this time their series is 7.
The Exynos 5 octa has been the processor family tree that Samsung has built and used in many of its non-United States-bound Galaxy devices, dating all the way back to the Galaxy S IV in 2013. The Exynos processor variants of popular devices like the Galaxy S 5 and Galaxy Note III, both of which use the latest Exynos 5 octa processors, never see United States adoption because these chips do not support (or it is difficult to make them work with) U.S. LTE network connectivity, a staple in the U.S. phone market.
So what makes this specialized new processor special? Well, it is more powerful, but how much? According to Samsung, the Exynos 7 octa processor, when compared to the 5 octa, is 57% more powerful. That’s all well and good, but what about those specifics, like how and why? Well, here are two things that might mean very little to you: A57 and A53.
Know those two from somewhere? These two are architecture for ARM’s Cortex processor technology. They also mean one big thing for Samsung and their Exynos chips: they are 64-bit. We are used to seeing A7, A9, and maybe A15, but the two first, A57 and A53, signify a change in power, from 32-bit prevalence to 64-bit working its way into the normative.
Samsung has built another nifty trick into their latest set of Exynos processors, and it’s calle heterogenous multi-processing, or hmp for short. What’s it mean though? It means that the cores of the processors, the four A57 and the four A53 processors, though they will run at two different maximum frequencies, can work together. This means that they can function as both a high- and low-power cluster, but also as a set of eight cores working together at once for the massive and meaty tasks that you may put your phone through. It also means that they can work completely independent of each other, as well as together as one group.
Knowing this, do you think that Samsung’s new chipset will allow for some great performance in the real world? Or will it just be another processor in the market and list of variations between models? Excited that Samsung finally got all eight cores to work together, instead of having a ‘choice of quad cores’ like in the Galaxy line before now? Let us know down below.