Samsung at CES: Flexible displays, low-power LCDs, and all-new CPU designs

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Samsung’s CES keynote was an all-around look at the work the company is doing on a variety of fronts. CPU technology was front and center, including the announcement of the new Exynos 5 Octa. This new chip is the first SoC to implement ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture from any manufacturer. The Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core product that pairs four Cortex-A7 CPUs with four Cortex-A15s. Simple tasks are offloaded to the A7 processors, which consume significantly less power, while the A15s spin up for heavy lifting.

Like the older Cortex-A8, the A7 is a simple in-order design. It’s capable of issuing 1-2 instructions per clock cycle, has an eight stage pipeline, and an integrated FPU. It’s feature compatible with the A15; application developers won’t have to modify their code to target the A7 in particular. Clock speeds are rumored to be up to 1.2GHz for the A7 cores and 1.8GHz for the A5s.

How well it works will depend on how sophisticated and flexible the switching system is. It’s not clear if Android, Windows Phone 8, or Windows RT can preferentially target one set of cores over the other, or whether or not the SoC can use the A7 and A15 cores simultaneously. Ideally, tasks like push notifications could target the A7, no matter what, freeing up the A15 to focus on gaming or HD decoding.
Nvidia’s Companion Core targets the same idea as big.LITTLE, but from a different angle. Tegra 4’s fifth core is also a Cortex-A15, albeit an optimized chip that’s designed for lower voltage and clock speed targets. The overall implementation is similar to what we saw with Tegra 3. A slow Cortex-A15 will probably outperform a fast A7 — but what about 2-4 of them? That’ll hang on CPU optimizations, multi-threading support, and load balancing.
Intel, meanwhile, has previously stated that it doesn’t need to implement a big.LITTLE or Companion Core design to hit its power consumption targets. Medfield was generally competitive on this front; we’ll have to wait and see how next-generation dual-core Atom phones compare to these newer parts.

Display technology: Onward, upward, rolled up in your pocket

4K televisions? Check. OLED displays? Check. The more interesting display technologies were Samsung’s demonstration of flexible displays and some new information on LCD power efficiency improvements.

The flexible displays the company demoed are manufactured by Yuon and can be bent, twisted, and folded. That last one is a new capability; previous displays have been bendable, but haven’t been capable of folding flat. Samsung is investing heavily in Yuon, but didn’t give any information on when we might see these new displays incorporated into products.

Samsung claims that the Nexus 10’s display uses just 75% as much power as typical LCD panels, and that the company is working on technology to cut that figure another 25 percentage points.
We talk a lot about CPU power efficiency, but the central processor is only one component out of many in modern smartphones or tablets. While it’s true that CPUs at full load can chew through huge amounts of battery power, Intel, Nvidia, and ARM itself have all invested a great deal of cash into finding ways to make sure chips spend as little time at full power as possible.
Display power and brightness now account for a considerably larger amount of overall power consumption than the CPU, and the trend towards high-density displays has only made the difference more lopsided. A 25% display power reduction would translate into real battery life improvements — provided that Samsung didn’t immediately obviate the gain by ratcheting up pixel densities into the stratosphere.
No price tags or launch dates for OLED or 4K, by the way — but with LG actually launching a product in the next couple months, you can bet Samsung will be watching closely. If it looks like consumers are leaping to buy (relatively speaking), we’ll see more OLED HDTVs moving to market.
Overall, Samsung’s keynote was solid, but it echoes a theme we’ve seen cropping up at CES 2013 from more than one company. A great deal of the discussion is focused on future products and technologies as opposed to concrete launch dates and nearly finished hardware. That doesn’t mean new products aren’t coming, but most companies seem to be playing it safe. On the other hand, we’re not going to complain when manufacturers don’t promise impossible ship dates.