After announcing its Exynos 5 Octa SoC (system-on-a-chip) in March and updating it with some added graphical prowess in July via the Exynos 5420, Samsung Electronics is now aiming to boost the performance of its top-end mobile CPUs even further.

The Korean tech giant has revealed its heterogeneous multiprocessing (HMP) solution for the Exynos 5 Octa, which will enable the eight-core processor to employ all of its cores at the same time.

Eight cores are better than four

Currently, computationally intensive software threads are processed by the four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, whilst less demanding calculations are handled by the four Cortex-A7 cores. This configuration sees the SoC having to constantly switch between the A15 and A7 cores to perform tasks.

HMP will change this since it will control the scheduling of threads of execution to the appropriate core, with the ability to run both the high performance and power efficient cores simultaneously.  

Samsung stated that the HMP solution for Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa application processors will be available to customers in Q4 2013.

To the point

The quickest processing gun in the SoC west is currently Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800, which does duty in the LG G2, Sony Xperia Z Ultra phablet, and upcoming Xperia Z1. This move by Samsung will most likely lead to a new king occupying the mobile CPU throne.

“It’s usually assumed that the big CPU will do all the performance-critical work, however, power-efficient little cores can handle many significant workloads all on their own, so the workload is balanced within the system,” said Taehoon Kim, VP of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics.

Kim added that, “big.LITTLE processing is designed to deliver the right combination of processors for a specific job. 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.”

In related news, Samsung also recently unveiled its new Galaxy Gear smartwatch as well as the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.