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China's Allwinner also has an octa-core chip, touts powerful graphics
Samsung, MediaTek, Huawei and even Qualcomm are now in the octa-core SoC game, but there's always space for more. The latest member is China's Allwinner Technology, who's best known for making the chipsets inside many low-end devices. Like most of its competitors, Allwinner's UltraOcta A80 silicon (pictured above on a development board) uses ARM's big.LITTLE heterogeneous multi-processing design, meaning it can simultaneously run on all eight cores -- four low-power Cortex-A7 and four high-end Cortex-A15. The chip also features Imagination Technologies' 64-core PowerVR G6230 GPU, which promises to deliver "a twofold increase in graphics" performance when compared to Allwinner's previous flagship SoC, the A31 series. We'll spare you from all the nitty-gritty, but you can learn more in the source links below. Expect to see the UltraOcta A80 in affordable devices "in the next few months."
Qualcomm updates its top-end chip, reveals future 64-bit and octa-core Snapdragons
No, this isn't quite the flagship chip we've been waiting on, but it's a worthy stopgap. Qualcomm has upgraded its successful Snapdragon 800 processor and notched up its title to the 801. For now, it probably represents the peak of the 32-bit era of Android, with clock speed increases across the board, including a nearly 10 percent increase on the CPU side of things (2.5Ghz instead of the 800's 2.3GHz), a 30 percent increase for the Adreno GPU as well as faster memory. Speed increases like that are par for the course as silicon fabs get into the swing of each product generation, but it means it'll be worth looking out for top-end phones that makes use of the extra power -- not least Sony's Xperia Z2, which is due out next month. As for 64-bit chips, we've already seen the low-end Snapdragon 410, but now Qualcomm has also revealed plans for its mid-tier Snapdragon 600-series. The Snapdragon 610 and 615 will arrive in Android smartphones in Q4 of this year, regardless of whether Android is able to benefit from 64-bit processing by that time. Like the 410 and other devices that will be based on ARM's Cortex-A53, there's full backwards compatibility with existing 32-bit apps, so it's more about future-proofing than anything else. In the case of the Snadpragon 615, it's Qualcomm's first-ever octa-core silicon. According to Anandtech, it looks like the eight cores are divided into two "clusters" that are similar to ARM's big.LITTLE design -- in other words, each quad-core cluster may be designed to handle different sorts of tasks. But Qualcomm added that all eight cores can be operational at the same time, making it a more powerful alternative -- and a more direct threat -- to MediaTek's own octa-core offer.
MediaTek launches world's first true octa-core mobile chip, first devices due end of year
Qualcomm's nightmare has finally come true. Earlier today, MediaTek officially introduced the world's first true octa-core mobile processor, MT6592, and the first devices to feature it are expected to arrive as soon as end of year. This 28nm chip packs eight low-power Cortex-A7 cores, and courtesy of the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing use model on top of ARM's big.LITTLE architecture (though it's actually "LITTLE.LITTLE" in this case), all eight cores can operate simultaneously -- at up to between 1.7GHz and 2GHz, depending on the bin. MediaTek pointed that Chrome can already make use of all eight cores, and likewise with some map apps, video players plus multi-window function. According to the company's figures, the MT6592 manages to beat what appears to be the quad-core Snapdragon 800 in benchmarks, power consumption (as low as 40 percent) and temperature. You can see the full detail in this article's gallery.
Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa CPUs will be able to use all eight cores at once in Q4
We'll have to change our terminology for Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa mobile chips now. We've been calling them "not-quite" eight core CPUs since they can't actually use all eight at once, but the company's new Heterogeneous Multi-Processing solution is going to change that. Once it's available in Q4 it will let devices access both sides of the big.LITTLE ARM configuration simultaneously, which it claims will increase both performance and efficiency. While software threads with high priority use the "big" A15 core, lower priority tasks can run on the "small" A7 without needing to switch back and forth. Samsung isn't the only one running this setup however, as MediaTek announced an implementation for its MT8135 back in July. There are more details included in the press release (after the break) but we're not seeing any confirmation if this will ever be enabled on existing / announced devices like some flavors of the Galaxy S 4 or the Meizu MX3. Either way, the folks at Qualcomm might want to put together another video.
