Samsung has lifted the lid on its new super phone, the Galaxy S4. While its design might not look much different from the older S3, a lot of noise has been made over the eight cores it uses in its processor. Before you get too excited about infinite power from eight whole cores though, there are some things you should know about that chip.
Although there are eight cores on board (see update below), you won't actually be using all of them at once. Instead, it's more of a four-plus-four situation. For normal tasks, including handling background processes, a quad-core Cortex A7 processor clocked at 1.2GHz will be used. When you load up the intense stuff like demanding 3D gaming, it'll switch over to a quad core Cortex A15 chip.
The S4's processor combines "the most energy efficient application processor that ARM has developed, the Cortex-A7, with the highest performance application processor for mobile application, the Cortex-A15," according to Laurence Bryant, director of mobile segment marketing for ARM, the company creates these chips.
Having the phone constantly running on the super-charged side of the chip will of course drain battery life faster than you can say "hand me my plug", so the lower-powered portion should help keep it from being too demanding of the juice.
You might be disappointed not to have the first phone that's making use of eight whole processing cores at once, but the fact remains that that much power in a phone would be pretty pointless. Annihilation of your battery aside, there just isn't anything you can really do with phones that require that kind of processing.
The majority of apps you're likely to use on a day to day basis can still run adequately on dual- and even single-core processors, with only the more demanding 3D games like Riptide GP and Real Racing requiring more juice to play smoothly. We'll see exactly how much this processor has to offer when we give it the full review treatment.
Update: Samsung has confirmed the UK will not receive the eight-core S4. "In the UK," Samsung says, "the Galaxy S4 will be available as a 4G device with a 1.9GHz Quad Core Processor." Read the full story here.
Head over to our preview of the S4 to read a whole lot more about the phone, and make sure to drop your comments below or over on our Facebook page.
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iam a wp7 15 March, 2013 17:53
Is it sad that I knew it was Andy who wrote the article after i read the title? 4 cores is enough for me at the minute. Never seem to get any lag or performance issues on the Note 2. Still I would rather have an octa core phone over a quad core one.
anonymous 15 March, 2013 19:41
It runs Android 2.2 Jellybean?!?!?!
anonymous 16 March, 2013 01:56
Hey any news yet in which area is Samsung using octacore or Qualcomms quadcore processor.
Europe ?
Korea ?
Rest of Asia ?
US - Qualcomm Quadcore
anonymous 16 March, 2013 11:50
Have you actually used a single core phone with a modded OS? I can only assume that you have not. I'm still using a Samsung Galaxy S and the lag is so unbearable that I avoid using my phone as much as possible.
Sorry but that reads like an attempt to diminish the fact that Samsung are, again, ahead of the game and pushing the envelope. What you see on the newest Samsung is what you'll seen on most smart phones in two years.
anonymous 16 March, 2013 11:54
We had this last year when the One X and SGS3 with quad core processors, yet now anything less on a new phone would be criticised. Don't know why journalists do stuff like this and then conveniently forget about it a year later when the thing they questioned is an industry standard.
I will never understand why so many 'tech' fans always feel the nneed to be cynical about any new innovation.
anonymous 4 April, 2013 16:54
I think ill pass with this one and wait for the note 3 :)