Samsung tipped to bring big.LITTLE ARM power to Chromebook

With the Samsung GALAXY S 4 in consumer hands internationally, fully stocked with Exynos OctaCore processors, so too has a new Chromebook been tipped with the same technology. While the big.LITTLE ARM processor architecture suggested for this next-generation machine has been implemented on the GALAXY S 4 (the international edition, that is) for a split between obvious “big” and “little” tasks, its usage in Chrome may be a bit less obvious. This device could very well be introduced at the June event teased by Samsung as well.

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While the technology used in the Samsung GALAXY S 4 sets “big” tasks as high-powered games, video processing, and GPS tracking, Chrome OS doesn’t generally have such high demands. Low-powered “little” tasks appear much more regularly – messaging, music, and background bits and pieces galore. These low-powered tasks are assigned to lower power cores in the SoC, therefor keeping energy demands as minimal as possible.

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It’s likely that this, not so much the high-powered end of things, would be the main reason a Samsung Exynos 5410 (or something similar) would be used in a Chromebook. The tip sent to MobileGeeks this week suggests this device might never actually come to the market, mind you.

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But consider the possibilities: perhaps this means Samsung will be releasing a device not unlike the Chromebook Pixel, complete with super-high-definition display and touchscreen abilities! It was no small deal when the entirety of Google I/O 2013 was given a Pixel to develop with – Samsung may just be following up with their own high-powered web-based machine soon.


Samsung tipped to bring big.LITTLE ARM power to Chromebook is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung Galaxy S 4 with Exynos Octa-core: what’s different?

Samsung Galaxy S 4 Exynos 5 Octacore benchmarks tktk

Samsung’s latest flagship, the Galaxy S 4, comes in two distinct flavors — and they’re both good. One uses the much-hyped Exynos Octa-core chip, while its identical twin takes advantage of the quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. In either case, the availability depends on where you live: the Exynos-powered I9500 is difficult to find in North America (at least for now), but our friends at Negri Electronics, an online retailer currently stocking the Octa-core device, gave us the opportunity to play with a unit for a few days. During our time with the device, we were able to get a solid feel for how this particular version of Samsung’s flagship compares to the Snapdragon 600-powered model. So how does it hold up against its Qualcomm brother in terms of performance and battery life? Read on to find out.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 release live in USA April 11th

Welcome to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 in its wi-fi edition, headed to the United States for release on the 11th of April for a cool off-contract price. This device is the latest in a line of Samsung Galaxy Note-branded smart devices, each of them either bordering between smartphone and tablet or heading straight for the gold with massive displays. With the Galaxy Note 8.0 you’ve got an 8-inch display and the all-powerful S-Pen that marks the uniqueness of the line.

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This device is the same as the one we saw earlier this year in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2013, this time coming to the USA without its rather strange phonecall feature. Here in the USA you’ll find a smart tablet from start to finish, bringing the power of the Galaxy Note II and the Galaxy Note 10.1 to an 8-inch tablet form factor. Inside you’ve got 2GB of RAM and an Exynos 1.6GHz Quad Core processor so you’ll be rolling right with some of the most powerful apps on the market.

Included in your purchase you’ll be getting 50GB of Dropbox cloud storage for 2 years (if you’re a new member), 1 month of free unlimited streaming music from Samsung’s Music Hub, and a $25 Google Play credit when you register your device. That’s $25 USD worth of whatever you like from Google’s own digital content store – you can buy apps with it, too, mind you!

This device will be available for $399.99 USD (MSRP) starting in mid-April wherever fine Samsung devices are sold. You’ll be able to purchase a host of accessories that include Book Covers in white, pink, grey, or green, travel chargers, USB and HDMI adapters, and more! Have a peek at our timeline of Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 features and hands-on posts below and let us know if you plan on picking this device up soon!


Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 release live in USA April 11th is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung Exynos Octa now rocking LTE, destined for Korean market

Samsung Exynos Octa now rocking LTE, destined to Korean market

When Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa was announced, it was believed to be compatible with 3G networks only. As such, the HSPA+ (global) version of the Galaxy S 4 was the only handset to feature the company’s eight-core SoC — the LTE model shipping with Qualcomm’s 4G-capable, quad-core Snapdragon 600 instead. That’s apparently changed, with the Korean giant tweeting that the Exynos 5 Octa now supports LTE on 20 bands. So why even make a Snapdragon 600 version of the Galaxy S 4, then? Perhaps Samsung can’t produce as many chips as Qualcomm to meet the upcoming worldwide demand for its new flagship. This appears likely, with inews24 and new-samsunggalaxys4 reporting that the Exynos 5 Octa with LTE is currently reserved for Korean models only (SHV-E300S, SHV-E300K and SHV-E300L, to be exact). So, anyone fancy a trip to Seoul in the near future?

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Via: GSMArena

Source: SamsungExynos (Twitter)

SlashGear 101: The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa Processor

When you’re getting to know the 8 CPU cores of the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa SoC, you’ll first want to understand that they absolutely do not work the same way as multi-core mobile processors have in the past. While the Exynos 5 Octa does have 8 CPU cores, they’re never being used all at once. Instead you’ve got 2 distinct pairs of 4 CPU cores, four of them “big”, the other four “LITTLE”. The Exynos 5 Octa SoC works with what’s called big.LITTLE architecture, this term coming from the British processor company ARM.

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Inside the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor you’ll find two sets of CPU cores, both of them made with ARM technology. There are four Cortex-A15 CPU cores as well as four Cortex-A7 processor. The Cortex-A15 processors take care of processing-intense (read: “big”) tasks while the Cortex-A7 cores take care of lighter (LITTLE) workloads. That’s two sets of four cores that are never all being used on the same task at once.

What you’re about to see is a chart showing in a very basic way how big.LITTLE technology works with the Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 CPU units working together.

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According to Samsung, the Exynos 5 Octa will be enhancing the 3D graphics processing capabilities by a factor of two – or more – over that of the Exynos 4 Quad processor. That processor was found in devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note II, the Galaxy S III (international edition), and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

The company has also noted that the Exynos 5 Octa is able to drive devices with displays as large as WQXGA (2560×1600) pixels sharp. Devices with this dense a display have not yet hit the market at the time of this article’s publication – but we may see beasts like this inside the next year. Perhaps on the Samsung Galaxy S 5. The Exynos 5 Octa works with e-MMC (embedded multimedia card) 5.0 as well, and works with a USB 3.0 interface for the “first time in the industry” according to Samsung.

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With the Exynos 5 Octa you’ve got incorporation of a full HD 60fps (frame per second) video hardware codec engine made powerful enough for 1080p video recording and playback. Also included is a 13 mega-pixel 30fps image signal processor interface as well as a 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth interface that enables use of a Full HD Wifi display.

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Samsung has today let the world know that the Exynos 5 Octa application processor will be going into mass-production in Q2 of 2013. They’ve made it clear that this processor architecture will be made specifically for high-end mobile devices and – at the time of the publication of this article – the first release of the Exynos 5 Octa will be inside the Samsung GALAXY S 4.

Have a peek at our hands-on with the Samsung GALAXY S 4 now and stick around the Samsung GALAXY S 4 tag portal for more information leading up to (and through) the final market release of this smartphone.


SlashGear 101: The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa Processor is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung puts Exynos 5 Octa into production: guess who’s the first customer

Samsung puts Exynos 5 Octa in mass production, no prizes for guessing where it shows up

That Galaxy S 4 isn’t going to compute tasks through sheer force of will, you know. Just a day after Samsung unveiled the smartphone as its inaugural Exynos 5 Octa device, the company has confirmed that the not-really-eight-core ARM processor should be in mass production during the second quarter of the year, or between April and June. There aren’t many more details to share beyond what the company mentioned at CES, but that doesn’t diminish what could be a best-of-all-worlds processor: the automatic switching between four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores should give it a performance edge over many of its peers while reducing power consumption by up to 70 percent. We also know that the Octa’s graphics performance has largely caught up to peers versus earlier Exynos 4 designs, as Imagination Technologies has confirmed that its PowerVR SGX544MP is providing enough muscle to double 3D performance over the creaky Mali-400 in the Exynos 4 Quad. About the only mystery left is whether or not many companies beyond Samsung will get a chance at some Exynos 5 Octa silicon, although there’s one or two prospects.

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Source: Samsung, Imagination Technologies

Samsung announces production of Exynos 5 Octa chip

Samsung announced its new flagship GALAXY S 4 last night in New York City in full broadway style, and just today we confirmed that the new device runs Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon 600 chipset in the US, while other regions will be getting Samsung’s new Exynos 5 Octa processor, which the company will be putting into production starting sometime in Q2 2013.

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New details are pretty slim, but the new chip’s architecture is based on the Cortex-A15 chip, and the Exynos 5 features a mixture between the Cortex-A15 and the A7 to offer the best of both worlds: four Cortex-A15 cores for intensive tasks, along with four more Cortex-A7 cores that handle the lighter stuff.

Samsung claims that this setup offers up to 70% more efficiency compared to using only Cortex-A15 cores. Samsung says that the new Exynos processor will be manufactured using the company’s latest 28-nanometer design, which increases power efficiency and produces less heat — two things that are crucial for a good chip.

The GALAXY S 4 is obviously the first device to sport the new processor, and we’re positive that more devices will make their way to the forefront sporting the new chip. If you’re not familiar with Octa-core processors, don’t worry, as we’ll be posting an in-depth “SlashGear 101″ primer later today. Stay tuned!


Samsung announces production of Exynos 5 Octa chip is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung Galaxy S 4′s Quad-Core/Octa-Core Chipsets Are Focused On Efficiency And LTE

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Much about the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, is the company remixing its Galaxy S III formula — with no big changes to the design or UI look and feel, and new software features such as face tracking additions like Smart Scroll and Smart Pause that add to and build on what came before. On the hardware side Samsung is also following its prior pattern, putting different chipsets in the U.S. and international versions of the phone as it did with the S III. So while the U.S. S 4 has a 1.9GHz quad-core chip, the international version gets a 1.6GHz octa-core chip.

Samsung did not confirm exactly what the U.S. chipset is at yesterday’s launch, but the word on the street is it’s Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600. The international S 4 chipset, however, is apparently Samsung’s own Exynos 5 chip, which is built on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture — so what you’re really getting is a quad-core phone with two clusters of four chips that it switches between, depending on how taxing whatever you’re asking it to do is.

Octa-Cores vs Eight Cores

“It isn’t an eight-core chip in the traditional sense of eight cores — it’s not like the same jump from dual-core to quad-core,” says Nick Dillon, analyst at Ovum. “The lower powered cores run when it’s just idling in the background and then when you need the full power it kind of clicks over to the other one.”

So this is not a case of the U.S. getting shortchanged on S 4 cores, rather it’s just two different approaches to achieving similar power-plus-efficiency ends — all the more important for a phone with such a big screen (pushed up to a full ‘phablet’ 5 inches from the S III’s slightly more modest 4.8-inch pane).

“I guess somebody like Qualcomm would probably argue they don’t need to have that complexity [of octa-cores] because what they’re able to is dial down the power of their main chip to a lower power when it just needs to idle,” Dillon adds. “They can adjust the clockspeed and the power that goes into them on the fly so they really don’t need this compromise of having four extra chips.”

Speaking to TechCrunch at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona last month, Qualcomm’s Raj Talluri, SVP of product management, did argue just that — saying the chipmaker is focused on “heterogeneous compute” for the next generation of chipset innovation, or getting the various components to work together better, rather than just sticking in more cores.

“Clearly we will do the right number of cores to get the right performance but that’s not all we focus on,” Talluri told TechCrunch, pointing to video, audio, camera, LTE, touch input, gestures, different forms of user interface, noise cancelling tech, gaming and more as all areas the chipmaker now has to consider. “If all we had to do was multicore my job would be very easy.”

So which approach is best? Four big cores that can act like they’re little or a pair of big and small quad-cores? At this early point it’s hard to say, until the comprehensive benchmarks and real-world tests start rolling in.

“Whether [Samsung’s octa-core chip is] actually going to bring any real world benefit in terms of top end speed or in fact battery life… we’ll have to see,” says Dillon, adding: “This is the  first device with the chip in it — the first phone at least.”

Of course, from a spec sheet point of view, Samsung’s octa-core boast might garner a little more attention than the quad-core label. ”From a marketing point of view, it obviously sounds impressive,” adds Dillon. “It’s still a specs race at the top end. You’ve got to have the fastest process so if you’re able, through your own technology, to include what looks like an even better processor — on paper at least — then you’ve got to.”

But marketing vanity metrics won’t win you long term customer loyalty if the overall experience is poor. And while mobile apps that truly tax multicore chips remain thin on the ground, every mobile user knows what it’s like to run out of juice — hence both Samsung and Qualcomm are focusing on making less wasteful use of all that power sitting in our pockets.

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Why can’t Samsung just stick its own Exynos chip across the board in the S 4? The answer is likely to be LTE/4G — underlining once again how Qualcomm’s decision to wrong-foot the competition by moving quickly on LTE continues to pay off for mobile’s No. 1 chipset maker.

“Samsung is not as advanced in terms of their LTE modem development as Qualcomm are, who are by far the leaders in that space,” notes Dillon.

IHS Screen Digest analyst Ian Fogg also explains the chip variation between geographies as “almost certainly” down to “LTE maturity in terms of bands available” — since the processor is integrated with the LTE hardware (and different LTE bands are in use in different parts of the world).

While Samsung has now got LTE connectivity in its own modem, it’s likely they don’t have support for commonly used bands in the U.S. such as 700Mhz, says Dillon.

“Maybe they’ve had to fall back on Qualcomm to provide that variant, that connectivity in that market,” he adds. “You can imagine that if that capability was there they’d stick their chip in everything.”

Quad-Core Apps

What about apps? Is there much making use of quad-cores at this point? ”It’s hard to tell whether Samsung are making the most of all this extra power,” concedes Dillon. Many of the Samsung software additions to the S 4 are focused on the camera, with apps like dual record and dual shoot, but such apps are likely to be able to lean on dedicated image processing hardware to do the grunt work, rather than requiring massively multicore processors.

“We’ve kind of got to the point where most dual-core chips and definitely quad-cores, there’s nothing really that pushes the limits of them,” adds Dillon. “There are a few very specific applications — some augmented reality stuff for example is pushing the boundary but the majority of what you’re doing on most phones, switching between apps, general usage, you’re not going to see any difference.

“So I think the focus has shifted somewhat to power efficiency and battery life — which is where the whole big.LITTLE thing comes in. Having the high power but also using less power meaning you can actually make it through the day on a charge — which is a real issue.”

The multicore race for mobiles may not quite be over — at least not on the marketing front — but it looks like a war of diminishing returns at this point. “I think it will be of reducing interest for consumers,” concludes Dillon. “I don’t think consumers will see a direct benefit from it. Never mind looking on paper but in terms of reality — having a quad-core over an eight core, whether you’ll actually see any difference between those is debatable.”

It’s pretty much the same point Qualcomm’s Talluri made last month, when asked whether phones actually need eight cores: “We definitely haven’t said eight cores, we said we have four good ones,” he told TechCrunch.

But Talluri did point to some apps — such as video games and a video editing application Qualcomm was demoing at MWC — as examples of software that is beginning to tax quad-core hardware.

He also suggested video is are an area where quad-core chips have the potential to support new types of (disruptive) experiences and applications. “Slowly applications are catching up to using multicore,” he said. “We have very nice video editor application – the first real quad core application I think that’s not a gaming or a browser. And you can see as you plug in more cores the performance is better.”

Samsung Galaxy S 4 disassembled before official announcement

Samsung is currently announcing the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and all of the official information we have been waiting for. But for those of you who want to get a sneak peak inside of the device, we have some good news for you. A tech journalist from China was able to get his hands on the device before it’s been officially released to the world. Thanks to China Unicom, a Chinese telecoms operator, he was able to get a hold of the device and disassemble it for us.

Samsung Galaxy S 4 disassembled before announcement

So what can we expect from the phone? The Samsung Galaxy S 4 (at least the version that’s being released in China) definitely has Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa CPU. It has a 13MP rear-facing camera with a dedicated imaging chip, 2GB of RAM, and a 5-inch 1080p screen. All specs that we have already confirmed, however, one thing that is unfortunate is that the phone doesn’t seem to support 4G LTE technology (only in China), but only 3G networks (HSPA+ and such).

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 will also have a microSD card slot, a requirement for many of you who require expandable storage. The phone (at least the Chinese version) also has dual-sim card slots. Also upon closer inspection, it looks as though there is a special heat sink designed for the Exynos 5 Octa processor, so you won’t have to worry about the phone overheating and burning your hand/legs.

Stay tuned with SlashGear for the latest information on the Samsung Galaxy S 4, and what we can expect from both the international version of the device, as well as the version the United States will be getting. We already know that the United States version will have the quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor instead of the Exynos 5 Octa processor, a disappointment to many. However, Samsung hopes that the new technology and software integrated into the Samsung Galaxy S 4 will be more than enough to impress consumers.

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Samsung Galaxy S 4 disassembled before announcement

[via Mic Gadget]


Samsung Galaxy S 4 disassembled before official announcement is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Samsung Galaxy S IV: the rumor roundup

Samsung Galaxy S IV the rumor roundup

Compared to the sheer deluge of rumors surrounding last year’s Galaxy S III, talk about the Galaxy S IV has been relatively hushed. That’s partly owing to the contracted launch schedule — despite Samsung’s initial denials, the company is unveiling its next Android flagship almost two months before the GS3’s first birthday. There’s still been a fair share of rumormongering, however, and a picture is emerging of just what Samsung could unveil for yet another encore. Will the smartphone giant make a sharp break from tradition? Read past the break for a roundup of what to expect when Samsung hits the stage at Radio City Music Hall.

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