Samsung already planning an 8-core ARM chip

We knew that quad-core chips wouldn't be the end of the line for mobile devices, but we expected that they'd get a few years of maturation before the next step of processor evolution came. But, it looks like Samsung is already planning 8-core ARM chips, and could unveil the plans at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference on February 19th.

The idea appears to be something of an evolution of the "companion core" idea that underlies the Tegra 3. The Tegra 3 is a quad-core chip with a 5th companion core used for low-level processes in order to boost battery life. Samsung's 8-core chip is planned to be a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A15 for the high-level processing, along with a quad 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 for low-level operations. 

The Cortex-A7 side at least will be using ARM's big.LITTLE.computing idea, which means it is built with a 28 nanometer manufacturing process, which makes it 5 times smaller and more efficient than the current generation Cortex-A8. 

No word on release window, but it should be interesting to see the path of this chip.