Samsung's eight-core Galaxy S4 chip offered on new developer board

A Samsung eight-core chip used in some Galaxy S4 smartphone models is now available for hackers to play with on a developer board from South Korea-based Hardkernel.

Hardkernel’s Odroid XU board has incorporated Samsung’s eight-core Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip, which is based on ARM’s latest processor designs. Samsung recently announced a new eight-core chip, the Exynos 5 Octa 5420, which packs faster graphics and application processing than the 5410. The 5420 has not yet been shipped yet, however.

The Odroid board is priced at $149 through Aug. 31, after which it will be offered for $169. Samsung for many months has said that a board with an eight-core chip would be released, and has shown prototype developer boards at conferences.

The board has an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 graphics processor, 2GB of low-power DDR3 DRAM, two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. Other features include Wi-Fi, ethernet and optional Bluetooth. Google’s Android 4.2 operating system is preloaded, and support for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu is expected soon.

The board has already been benchmarked on Ubuntu 13.04.Odroid-XU will provide developers an opportunity to write programs tuned for Samsung’s octa-core chip, which has been a source of controversy. Analysts have said the eight-core design is overkill for small devices like smartphones and tablets, which need long battery life.

The eight-core chip design also takes up a lot of space, which prevented Samsung from putting LTE radios inside some Galaxy S4 models. Qualcomm, which hesitantly moved from the dual core to the quad-core design on its Snapdragon chips, on Friday criticized eight-core chips, calling the idea “dumb.”

Despite the criticism, the board will give developers a first true glimpse of, and an opportunity to write and test applications for, ARM’s Big.Little design. The design combines high-power cores for demanding applications with low-power cores for mundane tasks like texting and calling.

Samsung’s iteration of Big.Little in the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip combines four processors based on ARM’s latest Cortex-A15 processor design, which incorporates four low-power Cortex-A7 CPUs. The Cortex-A15 is ARM’s latest processor design and succeeds the previous Cortex-A9 core, which was used in popular smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and the Galaxy S3. Samsung said the eight-core chip provides a balance of power and performance, with the high-power cores kicking in only when necessary.

Cloud providers offered cut-price data centre hosting to serve customers

Companies can be surer in getting what they're being promised by cloud data providers thanks to a new service offered by Virtus Data Centres.

 

Announcing CoLo-on-Demand, Virtus CEO Neil Cresswell said: "The promise of cloud services is that customers can turn-up or turn-down the amount of computing power they buy at very short notice, so that their costs track their needs very closely.

 

"Until now, however, cloud providers have had heavy fixed data centre costs - often on a three, five or even 10 year contract that typically only goes up and never down."

 

Virtus promises to change this with CoLo-on-Demand by allowing cloud providers to cut their costs and pass on real scalability and savings to end user companies.

 

CoLo-on-Demand allows "cloud providers to have a cost model which matches their revenue stream" and "enjoy the same flexibility that they promise their customers", said Virtus.

 

The problem for cloud providers with conventional colocation charging models, Virtus said, is that they are based on the peak power load. So even if cloud providers only need, say 3kW in their data centre racks initially, and maybe more down the line, they usually have to commit to having more power than is needed at the start of their contract with the data centre.

 

That can make it a very high cost in the early days of operations and a particularly big long term commitment for smaller cloud providers.

 

With CoLo-on-Demand there is no time commitment. At the end of each month the cloud provider pays for the space and power they have used, based on how many kilowatts they have consumed to provide services to end user companies.

 

Virtus has set aside one of its halls in its North London data centre to provide the service.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl