A Software Update May Allow Samsung’s Octacore Chips To Actually Use All 8 Cores!
Samsung was one of the first manufacturers to come to market with an Octacore chip set. However, their Octacore chip (as it stands right now) isn’t really an Octacore chip. It is built on ARM’s big.Little architecture which consists of 4 ARM15 cores for heavy lifting and4 ARM7 cores for the more mundane tasks. In other words, these processors do not actually tap into all 8 cores at the same time but only 4 cores are ever being used at one time.
Well it appears that that could possibly change in the near future. Samsung recently announced something called Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Capability (or HMP for short) for Exynos Octa. What HMP will do is it allow developers to tap into all 8 cores on the processor at the same time for their apps! Now when Samsung announced HMP for Exynos Octa, they did not say one way or the other if the current Exynos 5410 (which is found on the international Galaxy S4 and soon a variant of Galaxy Note III) would get HMP functionality. However, Meizu, who also happens to be using the Exynos 5410 in their new phone, stated in a post yesterday that their new flagship, the MX3 (we wrote about this phone a couple of days ago) will receive a HMP upgrade later this year.
Now I don’t claim to understand the inner workings of processor or any of that stuff at all but based on what Meizu is saying, I’m given to understand that HMP can simply be enabled/added via a software update. That means that the international Galaxy S4 and incoming Galaxy Note III should also be able to add in HMP via a software update. While this isn’t huge news, it definitely future-proofs those phones utilizing the Exynos 5 chip that much more as they will be true octacore processors.
Sadly, this doesn’t mean a whole lot for us in Canada as our variants of these phones are using Snapdragon processors instead.