All hail the eight cores! Samsung announces Exynos 5 Octa mobile processor

If you lost interest in smartphone and tablet chipsets after they passed the dual-core stage, maybe the newest Samsung announcement will bring it back, as it has not two or four, but a full eight processor cores, aptly named the Exynos 5 Octa.

The latest member of the 5-series has been done with a 28nm process, and frugality/performance ratio in mind, as the chief of Samsung Electronics Stephen Woo admitted that the task to up performance while decreasing power consumption has been the one bothering him, and keeping him awake at night.

With Exynos 5 Octa, Samsung thinks it has cracked that code, and demonstrated on stage how you can search for restaurants and watch an HD movie at the same time, as well as some 3D gaming with Need for Speed: Most Wanted chosen as the demo. "Level of pure processing power, never seen before in mobile devices" and "more detailed damage to cards, then ever before" were just a few of the superlatives thrown at Exynos 5 Octa during gaming.

Samsung's peeps said that the new Exynos has twice the graphics performance of anything currently on the market, but it is also very frugal, for up to 70% power savings. It's built around ARM's big.LITTLE concept, with a mix of frugal Cortex-A7 cores for the mundane tasks, and Cortex-A15 ones for the heavy lifting.

They showed a chart with performance/power consumption ratios, and, needless to say, the Exynos 5 Octa was top dog there, so we can't wait to see this buddy in phones and tablets, pitted against Tegra 4, and Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 600 and 800 families. Samsung also mentioned that the road ahead includes plans for 20nm, 14nm and even 10nm mobile chipsets, so the good news is far from over in that department.