This is the chip that powers the recently announced HTC One M9 and the LG G Flex 2.Īt the start of the year, Nvidia unveiled the Tegra X1, its new super-powerful mobile processor that will be at the heart of the company’s push into automotive computing. More recently, Qualcomm switched to the big.LITTLE octa-core setup with its new Snapdragon 810 CPU. One of the first and most notable was Samsung’s own Exynos chip, which made its debut in Octa form – at least in some territories – with the Samsung Galaxy S4. ARM has iterated on this setup every year since, providing more capable chips on both halves of the octa-core divide.Ī number of major mobile chip manufacturers have based their efforts on this big.LITTLE, or octa-core, blueprint. This big.LITTLE octa-core architecture was announced in October 2011, enabling four low-power Cortex-A7 cores to operate with four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores. Related: How many cores do you actually need in a phone?Īll modern octa-core mobile chips are based on ARM’s so-called big.LITTLE architecture. However, HD video, gaming, and photo manipulation most certainly are.Ĭombined with the fact that CPU manufacturing processes have gotten so precise now that you can squeeze much more onto a single chip, the octa-core concept seems to be a practical, if slightly inelegant, way to lengthen a modern phone’s battery life without compromising performance where it matters. Navigating through your home screens, checking messages, and even browsing the web aren’t particularly power-hungry tasks. The truth, however, is that you don’t really need that much processing power for the vast majority of smartphone tasks. The result: as smartphones have gotten more advanced, so battery life has plummeted. This poses a problem, given that smartphone battery technology hasn’t advanced at anywhere near the rate of mobile processor technology. The more powerful a CPU is, the more power it has to draw from a device’s battery. The table above shows multi-core benchmark performances of quad-core and octa-core smartphones and tablets (image credit: Geekbench 3) Octa-core vs Quad-core: Purpose What’s the point of having two sets of quad-core processors handing off tasks to one another, then? It’s all about energy efficiency. But that just sounds confusing, and it’s not nearly so marketable. When advanced tasks are needed, however, the faster set of four cores will kick in.Ī more accurate term than octa-core, then, would be “dual quad-core”. Most of the time, the lower-powered set of cores will be employed. Modern octa-core chips, meanwhile, simply have two sets of quad-core processors, which split various tasks between them according to type. In the case of quad-core chips, each core can be put to work simultaneously on a given task, enabling fast and fluid multitasking, smooth 3D gameplay, and super-speedy camera performance, among other things.
So far, so obvious.īut the key difference between the two – at least when talking about mobile chips in 2015 – is how these processor cores are set up. The terms octa-core and quad-core denote the number of processor cores in a CPU. =””> Octa-core vs Quad-core: It’s not about power It’s not just about the numbers here.Īnd this is why some explanation of the difference between octa-core and quad-core is needed… So they’re pretty much twice as powerful, right? No. Octa-core chips have double the number of processor cores of quad-core chips, right? Yes. So is this really a big deal that we know have more cores powering our smartphones? Whether its the Samsung Galaxy S6, the Nexus 6P or the bargain priced OnePlus 2. Now, a year later everyone is moving to octa-core processors. Quad-core or Octa-core: Is there a difference? Here’s what you need to know about the processors packed into your smartphone and tabletsįor smartphones in 2014 it was mostly about quad-core power.
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