With CES just around the corner, Samsung has already started teasing what it has planned up for CES 2014. SamsungExynos’s Twitter account has teased asking if we are ready to #UnlockExynos. With UnlockExynos, it could possibly mean that Samsung are planning to update their current octa-core solution to true octa-core. Samsung was the first company to announce an octa-core processor and it featured in the Samsung Galaxy S4 which was launched earlier this year.
But it wasn’t a true octa-core product. There were a pair of quad-core processors that worked in tandem depending on the amount of load. This was based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture and later in the year, MediaTek unveiled the world’s first true octa-core solution that utilized all eight cores. Samsung updated their original octa-core SoC – Exynos 5410 to Exynos 5420 in Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and they claimed that the new SoC was capable of running eight cores at the same time. However, for 8 cores to work simultaneously HMP(Heterogeneous Multi Processing) has to be enabled both at the hardware as well as at the software(kernel) level. In the Galaxy Note 3 which is powered by Exynos 5420, HMP is already activated at hardware level and Samsung must update the software to make best use of the eight cores. Folks would be disappointed to know that Samsung Galaxy S4 which is powered by Exynos 5410 is not compatible with HMP.
With this feature yet to be “unlocked”, could the tweet be hinting at a possible minor update over the current processor? It will be very interesting to see what Samsung Exynos has to offer at CES 2014 as the company’s CEO had already said that they were already working on a 64bit processor to rival Apple’s 64 bit A7 processor.