Samsung Exynos 5 Octa chips refreshed with HMP to use all 8-cores at once

The latest move by the South Korean major is said to be the result of the criticism from competitors that claimed the Exynos 5 SoCs is not true octa-core as it could only use four cores at once. However, the company claims that with addition of the latest HMP solution for the Exynos 5 Octa chips can maximize the benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE technology.

As per Samsung, HMP solution is the powerful use model for ARM big.LITTLE technology, as it can use all physical cores at once. The software threads that come with high priority or high computational intensity can be performed by the Cortex-A15 cores while the threads with less priority can be allocated to the Cortex-A7 cores.

Commenting on the announcement, Taehoon Kim, vice president of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics said, "It's usually assumed that the big CPU will do all the performance-critical work, however, power-efficient little cores can handle many significant workloads all on their own, so the workload is balanced within the system."

Samsung expects the new Exynos 5 Octa chips with HMP solution will be available to users by Q4 2013. There is no word about which upcoming device will feature the new Exynos processor with HMP solution.

Earlier in July, the South Korean launched its new Exynos family, featuring the ARM Mali - T628 MP6 hexa-core GPU, offering 3D graphic processing that is two times more powerful than the previous generation of Exynos 5 Octa processors.

The Exynos 5420 processor is powered by four ARM Cortex-A15 cores clocked at 1.8GHz, with four additional Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz, in a big.LITTLE configuration.