Samsung to Unveil 4+4 Core big.LITTLE Processor in 2013

Samsung is reportedly taking interest in ARM's big.LITTLE technology - an SoC design in which high-performance Cortex-A15 cores are combined by low-power Cortex-A7 cores, and the two are made to trade places as the device's CPU, depending on the load. An SoC slated for 2013, which could probably feature in high-end smartphones and tablets, sees a combination of four each of A15 and A7 cores. The A15 cores are clocked at 1.80 GHz, and A7 at 1.20 GHz, with the former featuring higher IPC than the latter. A 2 MB last-level cache serves as town-square for data and instructions going to the various cores. The chip will be built on the 28 nm process.