Samsung unveils Orion, a dual-core chip for killer tablets and smartphones

geek.com

2 pointselblanco2 comments

I'm curious how "killer" it will be regarding power consumption. The present Hummingbird based Samsung's best single-core S5PC110 is already in 45 nm, so if they put two cores, the CPU will need twice as much power as now when both whenever the second core has to do something.

Well, the Hummingbird is based on the Cortex A8, which is in-order superscalar. (True) multi-core ARMs like this Orion are necessarily based on the Cortex A9, which was designed for up to 4 cores and is out-of-order superscalar.

I'm not sure if we know how efficient the newer microarchitecture is in general, and then there's going to be some overhead for multi-cored versions like sharing the L2 cache (e.g. coherency) and so on.

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