Octa-core Processors: They are Different!

By Nelson Lewis Munene

Along with the rapid development of mobile industry, great progress has been made in the development of mobile processors over the years. Now, it’s common for us to see smartphones powered by quad-core, octa-core and even ten-core processors in the current market. Statistical data in Antutu Report entitled TOP 10 Global Popular Smartphones and User Preferences, Q3 2016 suggested that in the third quarter of 2016 octa-core CPU has become mainstream configuration in the smartphone market, accounting for over 50% of the whole market share. How do the processor cores are set up in an octa-core processor? How do different octa-processors compare with one another in terms of CPU performance?

HiSilicon Kirin 960 which received wide public attention recently is also an octa-core processor aimed at high-end market. It is built on 16nm manufacturing process, with four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four Cortex- A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz which also used the big. Little architecture. Kirin 960 can employ each CPU core according to different use cases and work coordinately in daily use.

Now we can see that there do exist many differences among different octa-core processors in terms of manufacturing process, CPU architecture and CPU clock speed, etc. For the moment, octa-core design is still a good approach to smartphone chip design. A combination of different cores can generate chips of different levels which can meet different market demands. In particular, Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 uses the most advanced manufacturing process (14nm) of octa-core processors at the moment, which supports a winning combination of high-end features and low demand on battery life. HiSilicon Kirin 960 shows us the development strength of Chinese chip makers which are catching up with American, Korean chip makers. The octa-core processors of Samsung and MediaTek are also popular with their target customers and has certain market potential.