Samsung is working reportedly on a new mobile soc that has four Cortex A15 cores combined with four fuel-efficient Cortex A7 cores. This big.Little construction must ensure that the chip has a lot of computing power, but at a low cpu yet economical.
The Cortex A15 cluster would be clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2MB L2-cache. The Cortex A15 design is the successor of Cortex A9, which is now by many manufacturers of mobile chips used. The newest design is according to-up chip designer ARM roughly forty percent faster at the same clock speed. Samsung already have a dualcore soc based on Cortex A15, Exynos 5250, which is used in the Nexus 10 tablet from Google.
Because the Cortex A15 is less efficient than its predecessor, Samsung has chosen to be on the chip, a second cluster, which is built up of four Cortex A7 cores at 1.2 GHz. These are in terms of computing power, just something faster than the Cortex A8 design, which has for a number of years old, but there is a very low energy consumption compared to.
At low load, it is intended that the Cortex A15 cores are switched off, while one to four Cortex A7 cores remain active with simple tasks to deal with. This process is controlled at the hardware level and requires no adjustments in the operating system used. To switch between the two types of processor cores would be only 20ms costs at a clock speed of 1GHz. It is not yet known in which product Samsung the new chip to use. In the last few years has been the company’s fastest socs, the first in high-end smartphones deployed.
The combine of powerful and energy efficient cores is not a new concept; Nvidia introduced a year ago, a similar solution with its Tegra 3 soc. This consists of four regular Cortex A9 cores and an economical A9 core, which uses a different type of transistors and lower clocked. Presumably also Nvidia soon with a new chip that is a combination of the Cortex A7 and Cortex A15 designs.