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“A new Exynos 5 Octa is coming next week!” That’s what a graphic posted to the official Samsung Exynos Twitter is proclaiming, anyway. We don’t really know what will change from the first iteration of the chip, but let’s not worry about that for now. What I really want to know is why we didn’t see the Exynos 5 Octa deployed on a wider scale.
Off the top of my head the only device I can think of that used the chip was the international Samsung Galaxy S4. And now a new one is ready to drop? What are the chances we’ll see that version of the CPU make it into more than one phone?
The obvious candidate to act as a flagship for an updated Exynos chip is the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and we have every reason to believe that phone will use the revamped Exynos 5 Octa — maybe not in all regions, but we can safely bet that the international version of the phone will sport that processor. But if Samsung is going to put time and money into developing silicon for mobile devices, what’s the point if the final product only makes it into one or two handsets (and not even in devices launched in some of the bigger global markets)?
My suggestion: either get things together and switch to using in-house silicon on a majority of releases or get out of the CPU game. It’s clear Samsung has no problem using third-party chips as things stand, so why even bother?
[via Twitter]
I’d rather see them using the Snapdragon chips, better dev support since they don’t release everything for their exynos chips and most dev’s won’t touch devices with it in them.
They’ll probably have many versions and some of them will probably use snapdragon. Besides the dev support is great for exynos devices, just go to xda.
That was a long time ago. Have you read “The Exynos saga” on G+ yet. Developers are leaving Samsung left and right because of poor dev support
https://plus.google.com/101093310520661581786/posts/cdPnNjLAb4F
Let’s stop with the sensational talk. I haven’t read the “saga” but the support is actually pretty awesome for Note 2. Or any high-end samsung phones for that matter. No matter how you cut it, if you’re a dev, you’ll want to support samsung. The sheer amount of people using their phones will ensure that.
It’s not sensational talk. The link in question is to one of the lead developers.
Galaxy S3 (international) and Note 2 support are not as good as they should be. There’s a reason why a lot of the ROMs are just build.prop hacks. It’s behind many of the other phones due to the Exynos issues. There are working unstable versions, but there’s a reason why there’s no stable releases. And volume of people using the phone doesn’t mean much. It comes down to is Samsung willing to release the necessary Exynos documentation or not.
That’s why the latest crop of Samsung phones lack a stable version of Cyanogenmod 10.1, because at the moment it’s all hacks put together
yep! he is correct. Devs said they would continue to release roms for exynos processors, but that they would not be releasing any more stable roms for these versions. This statement was made just before launch of the S4. I think this had a lot to do with samsung releasing a “google edition”. They realize how important dev support is to them being 1 of, if not the # 1 phone manufacturer. With the Qualcom 800 processor being put in the new version of the S4 and this processor being all but confirmed in the note 3, i dont think the USA have to worry about this chip any time soon.
lol the Exynos is prob now LTE compatible, same thing last year with the Exynos 4, at first it wasn’t LTE compatible then when the Note 3 came, bam. Though the A15 is still more powerful than the S800, at 1.9 GHZ the Octa wrecked havoc on the 2.3 ghz S800, but the Adreno 330 GPu is way better than whatever Samsung is using, and i care more about the GPU.
Same here. I dont get why Samsung used a PowerVR GPU in the Octa and in the Dual-core Exynos 5 there is a Mali one thats around 50% faster if i remember correct.
I to really hope they gotten a better gpu. I had hoped they would go with a Mali again that was even better then the one in the dual-core.
I love the speed of the Exynos in my Note 2. I prefer snapdragon in the Note 3 so AOSP roms work without work a rounds that that work until you really need it.
True but if Samsung releases one version of the note 3, all sporting the exynos 5 octa just like the note 2 only had exynos processors, devs will be in line to develop for it.
I just got the Note II, so does that mean support for the T889 is going to be terrible?
Rom support might not be as good, but you’ll still get plenty of updates from Samsung.
Good because I would like my Note II to be filled with as many unique Touchwiz features as possible.
Come to Papa
My first thought was the refreshed Nexus 10 =)
I think Samsung knows what they are doing. One benefit of being a multi-billion dollar company is being able to dabble in a market with out hurting R&D funding.
Google does the same exact thing.
My guess is samsung is being smart and doesn’t want to ever not be able to deliver on a promise. They probably have not ramped up their production facilities for the highest level chips. The way processors and ram are manufactured isn’t what youd expect, they essentially try to make the highestx level chips possible and then the ones with faults are downclocked to be the midrange and low level chips. Chip production plants are serious investments, they take years to build and costs Billions, with a B. Samsung built one in texas for apple socs and it cost over 5 billion and made some not all of the ipad 2 chips. realize thats almost as much as what a nuclear poweplant costs to build
Smartphones don’t need octacore. They need bigger batteries.
True batteries are way too small right now, but the eventual goal of octacore is to utilize battery more efficiently, using big.LITTLE architecture. It doesn’t use 8 cores at once, it uses 4 high powered cores for max speed/multitasking, and switched to 4 low power cores when you are doing more basic stuff like texting or answering a phone call. I’m not convinced the technology is quite there yet, but its a start. This is more advanced then what nvidia tried with the tegra 3 that had 4 highpowered(for the time) +1 helper core that was a very slow low power core.
Although clever, it doesn’t really work in practice. Engadget reports that the LTE variant of the GS4 had better battery life than the Exynos model. Maybe this “refreshed” Exynos coupled with the beefy battery in the upcoming Note 3 will offer stellar battery life. The only company that has successfully implemented a processor that offers a significant increase in battery life is Intel and their Haswell chips. Intel didn’t even use some sort of strange “big.LITTLE” type architecture. The Haswell chips on MacBook Air’s are still dual core processors.
To be fair they also put a massive battery in those new macbook air’s. Haswell’s also couldn’t fit inside a smartphone, maybe in a really big tablet. As I said, the eventual goal…. it doesn’t work yet. Personally I think with the battery technology we have available now, I’d rather have lower resolution screen 720p on most phones (accept for maybe the absolute largest) and 1080p on tablets and laptops. The macbook pro retina, would be a great laptop, if it had a regular 1080p screen, look how much bigger of battery they had to give it to support those extra pixels and get the same battery life as the regular macbook pro.
But the snapdragon/lte variant getting better battery life, does show that in current technology it’s not ready, which is another reason we shouldn’t be complaining that the u.s. isn’t getting these basically experimental processors, let the third world do our beta testing, LOL.
They’re gonna have to allow a couple of cores from both processors to run asynchronously. Switching between one processor to another constantly drained too much power considering it was supposed to be a power sipping device. Also, I heard that their dev support is poor for most other Exynos processors. I wouldn’t know anything about that, but If that prevents me from getting a stable CM10.1 that makes me sad. They need to fix that to win over tech fans.