APE6 and big.LITTLE

Renesas is a Japanese chipmaker that at the Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona has unveiled its new SoC APE6, with an octa core architecture ARM big.LITTLE. After Samsung and LG thus joins the list of those who have adopted the solution of the English a third party. Unlike Samsung and LG, Renesas is a pure chipmaker that does not produce that device but also processors and other integrated chips. APE6 therefore does not arise, as it Exynos 5 Octa and Odin, primarily to meet the domestic needs of the companies that produce it, in order to equip their smartphones and tablets, but is designed from the beginning to be adopted by third-party devices, just as the SoC Qualcomm or Nvidia, which therefore are now a competitor in the most and the first to propose such a solution.

APE6 Even then, like its counterparts in Korea, has two quad core CPU, one based on core ARM Cortex A15 and the more energy parks Cortex A7 , combined with precisely controlled via an ARM big.LITTLE , which processes the real-time work on all eight cores depending on the type of instructions to be executed, thus optimizing both performance and energy savings.The System on a Chip Renesas but also has other features. As the products Qualcomm fact APE6 also integrates an internal modem LTE , also the operating frequency will be equal to 2 GHz (1.8 GHz against the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa and the LG Odin) but above all, unlike the two direct competitors, should APE6 have a much more powerful GPU, a PowerVR 6 series , code-named Rogue, Imagination Technologies, instead of those belonging to the older generation that equip the two solutions in Korea.

According to the site With Imagination fact the basic model of this new GPU, PowerVR G6100, would develop a computing power of 30 GFLOPS, much higher than that obtainable with the top range PowerVR Series 5. Renesas but has not yet released details on the version adopted, which could then be the G6100 but also a top model. At present, the Japanese chipmaker has provided no time frame for the release of its solution, which certainly looks set to high-end device, but it seems unlikely to be able to produce in volume until the beginning of 2014.