SAMAUNG GALAXY S4 AND THE big.LITTLE technology. A story untold

INTRODUCTION:

CPUs are one of the essential parts of any electronic gadgets we find today. They are sometimes clocked from even 50Mhz to 2.3 Ghz in the mobile industry and on the pc market we all heard the AMD announcing the new processors having a maximum clock speed of 5 Ghz which is mind blowing.

The mobile processing is quickly covering up the gap between pc performance and in no time phones will be capable of what an average laptop or pc can do and its not gonna surprise me if its gonna happen next year as we know ARM's A-50 A-57 is on works that supports 64-bit processing. Well lets hold our horses and get back to a not too old iteration and a brand new leap into mobile computing. Yes right from the heading you obviously know am gonna talk about the exynos 5 octa. Whats so special about it that we are looking on to it again? there's a lot happening on it and here i am to discuss a lil more deep about it.

EXYNOS 5 OCTA:

ISSUES:

So far we know exynos octa was the very first processor that has adopted ARM's revolutionary big.LITTLE technology which too far complicated to make it, it has 8 cores of which 4 will be A-7 and the other 4 will be A-15.

The deal about the big.LITTLE is that they only allow 4 cores to work at a time but it can be any 4 of the 8 and on any combination which lead to a better performance boost and also makes battery to last loger. In reality linux kernels wasn't mature enough to spot the difference between a power saving A-7 cortex and the high power processing A-15 thus samsung managed only to make it work in a manner where either 4 A-7 cotex core or 4 A-15 cortex processors could work at a time. It was totally different from what they demonstrated at CES 2013 and everyone including me was totally disappointed about it. I must say that this is a problem with android or any linux based os because all the cpu gpu threading and governing is done by them so only if the kernel has a better understanding on the processors is when you get better performance. As the exynos octa used on the galaxy s4 (GT-I9500) is running android they didn't have better coordination between the kernel and processor as the lack of support of architecture by linux resulted in overheating issues and also affects the software till date in some or the other way.

FIX:

Linux foundation so far has done its best to introduce newer architectures to support as they are big time opensource company so far and they have taken another leap forward to prove it again with adding the support for the big.LITTLE architecture after so much of hard-work on the kernel version 3.10 which is at its final stages on release. Thanks to Linux godfather Linus Torvalds has certified that the official Linux kernel 3.10 is now in its final state; and, as far as our audience is concerned, the big addition to the Linux kernel is with enhanced ARM processor support. Specifically, the Linux kernel 3.10 has added support for big.LITTLE.

 Linux kernel 3.10 is now final -- paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second -- rather than 1,000 times -- when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM support by including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types -- commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 -- that focus on either power savings or performance. 

CONCLUSSION :

I personally feel that we are yet to see the actually power of the exynos 5 octa and the kernel 3.10 is the right thing to do on updating it to all the devices running it. Samsung was all this time helpless to make people happy with the octa core phone as the kernel didn't support it and now its really a great time to make things right and make its customers happy. I wish samsung brings it up as a stability update for the device like it did previously with a 28Mb updates that always tweaked the kernels than getting it as an update with the newer version of android its too long to wait. I feel once the exynos octa get the 3.10 linux kernel we will surely get 20hrs of battery life on heavy performance and more than 2 days of battery life on a average usage and that's one thing we need the most now. Fingers crossed on hoping samsaung will work on it to straightening thing up for the users. Am really looking forward to it!. Just can't wait. how about you?.

GALAXY S4 GT-I9500 SOFTWARE UPDATE

Earlier we hear about the GT-I9505 the qcomm version of the galaxy S4 has been received a software update addressing issues like
-New Camera firmware
-Smearing issue has been fixed (Purple effect while scrolling)
-Smart Pause Toggle
-Move Apps to SD Card
-HDR Video (Can record HDR video)
-Semi-transparent status bar
-New Icons in Settings
-Secure boot status (About Phone)
-Increase legibility (Display) (New feature)

Sadly it wasn't made available for the EXYNOS octa version GT-I9500. It was just 4 days before they said it would come soon to GT-I9500 and here it is finally!.. am really happy to announce that the update is available in india for all the galaxy s4 GT-I9500 users!. All the above mentioned are working just fine!. you can either update your phone via OTA or connect to KIES. Have fun.

The next best thing.. Is it?

INTRODUCTION

We all know the biggest buzz. The GALAXY S4. Finally after the unpack event everyone got their pease. Though most of the rumors were true there were so many things that did throw a wow during the unpack event. All people could complain about was the plastic make. Am not going to comment on that but I must tell you that the phone feels premium enough and surprisingly one of the best devices to be hand held. Yes better than the HTC ONE. The galaxy s4 stands up to its own standards in battery life, performance and features.

SPECIFICATIONS

The galaxy s4 is not a world phone. Though that's quiet what we expected it would have been amazing to have one version of it to rule them all (iPhone strategy). Sadly there will be two variants that packs the following specifications

GT-I9505
Qualcomm 600 quad core karit processors with adreno 320 crunching the graphics.

2GB LDPR3 RAM

2600mah

Super AMOLED HD display with 441PPI

16/32/64GB internal storage + Miro SD card support up to another 64GB.

The snapdragon 600 by Qualcomm is so far the only commercially available processor breaking the records. Though adreno 320 is a bit old but its quiet amazing still with the smoothest and powerful graphic processing. The CPU clocking at 1.9 GHz (the highest frequency for 600) its blazing fast and better performing than any device running with the same chip. Yes I know what would be your next question "yeah we know the newer flagships always do the best in performance but what about the battery life?". That's one question I ask my self too and when the s4 was unpacked I was a bit disappointed with the 2600mah battery as I was expecting a 3000mah battery but when the results of the battery life test from gsmarena was released it was mind blowing. What the droid razor maxx achieved with its beefier battery the s4 managed to near it with a whooping 68hrs of backup on a decent usage. Trust me with so may sensors and a 5" 1080p display this the best you can get from a smart phone. Its quit understood that Samsung is not just keen on beefing up the performance and battery size but optimizing the os to perform to the fullest with the least usage of power now that's innovation. Have to give a big thumbs up for them on that.

The display is extremely gorgeous as usual except as using the pentile matrix they have tweaked the screen technology by thus giving the ultimate performance without sacrificing quality. There are more display mode including the RGB so I guess its up to us on what we Want to see. With an expandable storage of 64gb Samsung steals the show.

GT-I9500 ( INTERNATIONAL VERSION)
EXYNOS 5 (5410) OCTA processor with a Power VR 544 MP3 GPU. The only difference but indeed changes everything.

For beginners the exynos octa is an octa core processor though doesn't makes all the 8clusters function at the same time it works on the technology developed by ARM called BIGLITTLE. This BL (BIGLITTLE) technology consists of 4 cortex A-15 clusters or you can call very high performance oriented cores and another 4 clusters of cortex A-7 or low performance and battery saving cores. So what's BL's  magic here is that the cores switch between each other(a-15 to a-7) depending upon the load. Only 4 cores functions at a time so it can be of any order for example one A-7 core and 3 A-15 or vice versa. Thus in any combination by thus offering 70% battery saving while commencing normal tasks. That's a break through and its just because the A-7 and A-15 seamlessly syncs and switches at the very required moment. Let's say you are messaging and for that you don't need the high performing cores to get the job done and they use lot of power for it than the power saving one. During the web browsing some parts of the processing can be done by the A-7 at the same time needs good performance too so A-7 and A-15 works together and how may core from which cortex works will completely depend on the task and thus this I too consider as one of the most amazing innovations that helps the manufacturer to meet both performance and power saving so thumbs up again for Samsung. Surprisingly the A-15 cortex are clocked only at a 1.6 GHz and the A-7 at 1.2 GHz. As on competition everyone clocks a minimum of 1.7 GHz and so I guess with this frequency its surely gonna outperform the 600 clocked at 1.9 GHz. Exynos always means raw power and that's what this one is too going to be. This is still an illusion which may turn to reality as the benchmarking apps aren't optimized for the ARM's BIGLITTLE technology so time can only answer. Talking about Power VR Samsung hasn't switched from Mali since the galaxy s2 but the galaxy s did sport the power VR GPU and its nothing like its inferior to Mali or adreno. In fact the power VR 544 is the same GPU that the iPad 4 uses that crunched the graphic performance to the peak on benchmarks. Though again the 544 is older than adreno 320 its still has an amazing performance and supports direct x 9 and that's great because it supports all 3D games which the mali doesn't. So when it comes to gaming its gonna be the best you can ever have. This uses the mp3 version meaning the 3 core version than the mp4 (quad core version) found on the ipad4. Its clocked to a 533mhz and that's really a high speed indeed. With these two beast machines on the hardware I bet is going to deliver the best on performance and the highest battery life. But sadly it doesn't support the 4G LTE radio the 600 supports thus the reason for not being a world phone.

The 13megapixel camera is amazing and to everyone's surprise out performed the htc's ultra pixel even in low light conditions. The camera is stunning and has a new ui that's similar to that on the galaxy camera and not just that but offeres many more capturing modes than any other. Qualcomm says that the s4 can snap videos at 60fps in 1080p that means the s4 is gonna be the first android smartphone to shoot 60fps on 1080p joining the other gears like go pro. So on the whole gorgeous phone, amazing innovations, awesome performance & mind blowing battery life so what more do you need?

CONCLUSION

With the best performance, battery life and feature packed its one amazing phone. Not just that but it ships with android 4.2.2 which no one did and trust me touch wiz nature ux is the closest stack android exprencie you can ever get from any other custom skin and it really feels a colourful version of android which is very amazing to use. So on the whole the galaxy s4 is one phone to rule them all right from android experience to performance battery life & camera. For the record galaxy s4 is the first phone in 2013 to sport the Corning's gorilla glass 3. When the phone offeres so much I don't think plastic is to be more concerned about. Its a phone everyone one dreamt to be and Here it is so grab it than ignoring it on just one factor(plastic). Indeed its THE NEXT BEST THING. Am getting a galaxy s4, are you?.