Samsung Launches the Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A
by Brandon Chester on December 28, 2014 11:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Snapdragon 810
- Galaxy Note 4
Note: An earlier version of this article stated that this version of the Galaxy Note 4 used Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810. This is not the case, and the article had been amended to reflect the device's actual specifications.
Today Samsung has announced a new version of the Galaxy Note 4 which will be launching in the South Korean market in January 2015. There are currently two major models of the Note 4, with the main point of differentiation being the processor inside. Most markets received a model with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805 APQ8084 which is a 2.7GHz quad core Krait 450 part. In certain markets, it ships with Samsung's Exynos 5433 which has four Cortex-A53 cores and four Cortex-A57 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration.
The new Galaxy Note 4 adds a third model to this mix. It comes with the same Exynos 5433, but includes Samsung's SS333 modem. Samsung's main advertising point is the cellular speeds that this new Galaxy Note 4 model is capable of. Exynos Modem 333 allows for 3x20MHz carrier aggregation, which will enable LTE speeds of up to 450Mbps on future LTE networks that support Category 9 UE. It can also reach peak speeds of 300Mbps on current LTE networks that support Category 6 UE.
In all other respects, this is the same Galaxy Note 4 that was launched not long ago. Unfortunately, there's no indication that this new model will reach markets outside of Korea. However, like the Galaxy S5 LTE-A, there's always the possibility of importing it elsewhere.
Source: Samsung Tomorrow
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danielfranklin - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
While the device launch couldnt be more boring (same as SGS5 LTE-A, eg. only for Korea, no real performance benefit) the ability for Qualcomm to launch the 810 (even in small numbers) in January is a big deal.Puts most of those rumors to rest about the 810 not being ready.
That said, we will never know what their intended clocks were going to be, they still might be having issues with the 810 on the new 20nm and just dropped the clocks to compensate.
Time will tell, interesting none the less.
CoreyWat - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
I would say this all but confirmed, that the 810 is ready for the S6, if Samsung decides to go with a SnapdragonKPOM - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link
It will be interesting to see how the 810 that ships compares with the Apple A8. The 810 is based on a stock ARM design. It's been difficult to make apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended) since Apple has been on AArch64 for over a year now.jeffkibuule - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
Stock ARM CPU architecture, but not preferred CPU cluster arrangement admitted by even the designer of the Cortex A53. He would have thought that 2xA57 / 4x53 would be more balanced, but cores cores cores!Vegator - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
Indeed, Qualcomm already has such as chip, Snapdragon 808, which is supposed to be shipping around the same time as Snapdragon 810. This SoC is probably more balanced in terms of cost and power consumption than SoCs with four Cortex-A57 cores. I'd imagine the clock speed could also be higher.At the same time, Cortex-A53 only can also provide good performance in a many-core configuration (such as octa-core), providing performance rivalling or surpassing (for multi-core performance) current generation performance-oriented SoCs (such as Snapdragon 801 or Cortex-A15-based) for a fraction of the price. This is happening with Snapdragon 615 and several MediaTek SoC such as MT6752 and MT6795, which all have eight Cortex-A53 cores as the CPU.
Flunk - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
But marketing can't call that a octo-core so no one will buy it. I mean that very seriously, the only reason we even have quad-core phones right now is marketing.Almost nothing actually uses more than 2 cores because most mobile apps are primarily single-threaded with secondary worker threads used occasionally. Perfect use case for a dual-core.
ws3 - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
Of course, you don't even need two cores to run two or three threads just fine. The only time and extra core becomes "necessary" is when you are at 100% utilization on one core -- something which is almost never the case in normal usage, except perhaps in the case of some small number of demanding games.maximumGPU - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
That's not quite right. If you have several independent tasks that need to be run, then even if none of them pushes the cpu to 100% (i.e they're not cpu bound), then you'd still benefit greatly from multicore.ws3 - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
Your tasks *might* finish earlier with more cores if they aren't i/o bound (which almost all phone software is). But even in such a case, if "earlier" means 10 milliseconds earlier, then there is no benefit from the perspective of the phone user (remember, we're talking about phones here).azazel1024 - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
Not entirely true, there are cases where having a pair of cores at modest utilization levels, but low clocks uses less power than a single core at much higher clocks, as it enables lower voltage for the active cores than if one was clocked at full speed.So two cores at .8v and 1.2GHz instead of a single core running at 2.4GHz, but 1-1.1v is likely to consume less power.
It is very much a balancing act where it make sense to sleep extra cores and when it makes sense to wake them and spread the workload (when possible) so that you can downclock and devolt the active core(s).