Qualcomm chief slams 'misleading' Samsung Exynos 5 Octa CPU

Speaking at the Born Mobile event in China, Jacobs described Samsung’s emphasis on eight-cores as a misleading.

He alleged that adding more cores creates more challenging and less efficient implementation into smartphones because of battery power and heat issues.

Slightly less confrontational was Jacobs’ belief that the ‘core wars’, where manufacturers attempt to outdo each other simply by adding more cores, will come to an end and will instead be replaced by better optimisation.

While we can identify with the overarching point that more cores doesn’t necessarily mean a better setup, bashing Samsung’s Exynos Octa isn’t entirely justified when you consider that it’s using ARM’s more efficient big.Little architecture specifically to be better optimised and preserve battery life while not compromising performance.

To be fair, Samsung made more of a big deal out of the combined Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 setup and its battery-friendly properties than the fact that it was just an eight-core powerhouse.

Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon S4 'Prime' processors at CES.