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According to Samsung, it managed to sell 40 million Samsung Galaxy S3s in just six months. Compared to a ballpark 80 million Xbox 360s across seven years, this puts into perspective just how huge the smartphone market is and how successful the Korean firm's offerings are - suffice to say that the iPhone mega-brand is finally up against some serious competition. Last week, the S3's successor was revealed and the specs are extraordinary. When it launches, the Galaxy S4 will almost certainly be the most powerful smartphone money can buy.Taking centre stage is the new Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor, combining an impressive range of processing components. First and foremost, as the name suggests, the chip features eight CPU cores - unprecedented for a mobile device. However, it's important to point out that only four of them are ever active at any one point. The CPU is based on ARM's new big.LITTLE architecture, which aims to address a fundamental issue with its new A15 technology - the fact that it's a little too power-hungry for a smartphone-sized device. ARM's solution is ingenious, the firm pairing up each A15 core with a smaller, less capable but more power-efficient A7 core. The two cores share the same instruction set and can run the same code, with the device switching between them according to load. This core-juggling is all handled by the chip itself, with the OS recognising the CPU simply as a standard quad-core part.
Now, the usual form for power-saving is pretty straightforward - clock-speed scales according to CPU requirement - but we get the feeling that the conventional approach didn't produce the results ARM wanted. The A15 is an advanced core, occupying a fair amount of silicon and even on low clocks, the power usage was likely still too high. The A7 operates in a similar manner to the smaller, fifth "companion" core found in the Tegra 3 chip from Nvidia, smaller and simpler in nature, less powerful and more geared towards less demanding tasks. The notion of pairing such a core with each of the larger A15s is certainly ambitious and won't be cheap - Samsung is clearly investing heavily in making sure that the Galaxy S4 has the same kind of decent battery life as its predecessor.
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