Focus on core count is misleading
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs is back in the news and he is taking a swipe at Samsung, and to some extent Nvidia.
Speaking at a press event in China, Jacobs said Samsung’s octa-core Exynos 5 chip is a publicity stunt meant to hide a defect in the product. Jacobs claims that companies like Samsung are adding more CPU cores to their chipsets just for the sake of getting more attention.
He argued that the power consumption of Samsung’s four A15 cores was too high, so Samsung decided to turn it into an octa-core and slap four frugal A7 cores on the chip.
However, chips utilizing ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture can’t use all eight cores at once. They can either use four high-performance A15 cores or four A7 cores. Jacobs thinks Samsung’s octa-core approach is misleading and the trend of adding more cores to ARM SoCs will fade away soon.
Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 600 and 800 series parts are quad-cores, but Jacobs claims they can scale their performance and power consumption without the need for additional cores.
More here.
Update: Qualcomm informed us that Jacobs did not describe the Exynos 5 Octa as a publicty stunt during his address and that he was referring to an unhealthy emphasis on the number of cores, rather than particular chips. Unwired View apparently got the Chinese translation wrong. We apologize for the inconvenience.
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