Remember when Samsung announced the octo-core Exynos 5 and your brain exploded? Weeks later we’d all find out that while yes, there are eight physical cores on the chip, one four are being used at any given moment. It’s either the four ultra fast, but horrifically battery inefficient ARM Cortex A15 processors; or it’s the four semi-decent, but power sipping ARM Cortex A7 processors.
With the Galaxy S4, Samsung had to do a ton of hacking to make that work right, and one might argue that they failed judging by how few octo-core S4 units are in the wild. That’s soon going to change according to Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel. He’s just announced that version 3.10 of the kernel includes native support for ARM’s big.LITTLE technology. That’s the fancy marketing name for what the Exynos 5 Octa does. The big question is when will Android start using this new Linux kernel? Your guess is as good as mine, but I have a feeling we’ll see this happen sooner rather than later. And by soon I mean 12 months, which to you might seem like an eternity, but trust me, it’ll go by in the blink of an eye.
