Huawei preps octa-core ARM chip

Posted by Trent Nouveau


According to multiple reports, the SoC is based on ARM's Cortex-A15 design, with Engadget speculating that the chip will either be the HiSilicon K3V3 or a sister chipset, again manufactured by TSMC.

It remains unclear if Huawei's octa-core chip will adopt the same approach as Samsung's recently unveiled "5 Octa" which is built around ARM's big.LITTLE architecture.

As the name suggests, the SoC is an 8-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor, which pairs four high-power CPU cores with four lower-power cores. 

Essentially, the two sets of cores act as load balancers, allowing the chip to seamlessly switch between higher performance requirements and low-power tasks, thereby significantly extending battery life.

Both Huawei's chip and Samsung's SoC will compete with processors like Nvidia's Tegra 4 and Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragons when they hit the market later this year.