Yesterday Samsung confirmed that its Exynos 5420 processor can use all of its eight core simultaneously when it released a musical video composed of eight parts. The OCTA-pella video was a whimsical way for Samsung to show how the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture to balance workloads across CPU cores, using the right core for the right task. Today the company, in conjunction with ARM, has continued to underline the Heterogeneous Multi Processing (HMP) capabilities of its processor by releasing a set of videos which show how the different cores are used under different workload scenarios.
[quote qtext=”An eight-core processor with HMP is the truest form of the big.LITTLE technology with limitless benefits to the users of high-performance, low-power mobile products.” qperson=”Taehoon Kim, vice president of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics.” qsource=”” qposition=”left”]To recap, Samsung’s Exynos Octa 5410, which is in some versions of the Galaxy S4, had eight cores (four low-energy Cortex-A7 cores together with four more powerful Cortex-A15 cores) but only four of those eight could be active at any one time. The new chip, the Exynos 5420, allows for all eight cores to be active simultaneously. For more background on the history and technology behind HMP please read yesterday’s post.
The demonstrations, given by Ian Smythe of ARM, shows an activity monitor that plots the usage of each of the eight cores while an Android device powered by the Exynos 5420 is used in different situations including playing a game or loading an image intensive web page.
The first video shows how big.LITTLE HMP uses the different cores when running Angry Birds:
The next video shows how big.LITTLE HMP can work with the GPU, via RenderScript, to improve the quality of images from a web page:
The final video shows the Quickoffice app loading and scrolling thought a presentation. As with the other videos the activity monitor shows how the different cores are used:
