Report: Samsung working on “true octa-core” processor

Samsung’s Exynos Octa isn’t exactly a true eight-core processor, as only four cores can be active at any time depending on the workload, but a new report says that Samsung is working on a “true octa-core” processor with mass production scheduled for this year, in response to MediaTek, who recently unveiled an octa-core CPU of their own that can actually use all eight cores at the same time.

The difference between the two is the architecture used: Samsung used the big.LITTLE configuration, which enables four low-power Cortex-A7 cores for menial tasks and Cortex-A15 cores for demanding functions. MediaTek took it one step further by using big.LITTLE MP, where MP stands for multi-processing and allows both low and high-power cores to work at once. Samsung will no doubt do the same, and perhaps we could see them using custom ARM cores as was rumored recently, which means we could be looking at quite a beastly processor in the making.

While it’s too early to judge, we’ll likely see this true octa-core chipset make its debut in the Galaxy S5 next year, and we can’t wait to see what Samsung can do in terms of performance with their next hero chipset.