Samsung has been touting its Exynos 5 Octa chip for quite some time now. However, earlier implementations of the chip left something to be desired in the way the chip managed power. The Korean company has been working on an enhanced edition of the chip recently, and ARM has released some videos that show us the new chip in action.
First up is the GPU compute demonstration. In the video, ARM’s Ian Smythe demonstrates how the big.Little architecture of the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 is able to offload tasks to specific cores. For example, when not in need of high performance, the power-conservative A7 cores kick in. Imaging, on the other hand, is offloaded to the Mali GPU in the SoC, which not only saves power, but also gives better performance.
The next demo shows a game—namely, Angry Birds Rio—in action. The new version of the Exynos 5 Octa is much more efficient than the earlier iteration. Most of the time, the A7 cores are handling everything along with the GPU. Every once in a while, when more performance is needed, a power-hungry A15 core kicks in to, for example, load a level faster. There is no lag on the game despite it being more-or-less completely handled by the A7 cores.
The last demo shows a productivity app—QuickOffice—and how Exynos 5 Octa handles it. As the app loads, the A15 cores handle most of it so that it can start up faster. But the A7 take on the workload to conserve power. When scrolling through a presentation, all eight of the cores are active to give the best performance. However, when not doing anything, all of the cores are inactive, with an A7 core kicking up occassionally to keep the app alive and responsive.
All in all, the new Exynos 5 Octa 5420 chip looks like it’ll be very efficient, both in terms of raw power and battery consumption. This looks like a definitive upgrade to the earlier Exynos 5 Octa.