I am wondering, will the Galaxy S4 in the US be using the 8 core processor that is being hyped by Samsung, or will it be gimped in the US like the GS3? If anything, I also wonder why the GS3 was gimped anyway (although having twice the RAM than the international release).
I have heard that the 8 core is only available in Europe where there cell coverage is better, Apart from orange UK who got a corrupted sever and lost a bunch of data "so unlock codes are NOT available for Orange UK as well as the new 4G company EE.
The 8 core is only available where there is no 4G coverage I believe. Otherwise it will be the snapdragon 600 which will probably be better anyways.
I saw a video were they tested the quadcore vs the 8 core (which I would say is really also a quadcore, they put 4 fast cores and 4 slow cores in the chip, when the phone is idle the slow cores work, and under heavy work the fast cores take the load, while the slow cores shutdown, so you really have only 4 cores working at the time. is what samsung presented some time ago as the Big.Little architecture)
Anyway, in the video the quadcore snapdragon was way faster than the 8 core chip, the whole point of using the 8 core model was to save up battery, not boost the speed.
Alright, so I guess it's really nothing to worry about at all then, thanks everyone.
Like Sorsdivjus said, it's not really an 8-core chip in a sense that not all cores are of the same type. It's similar to Nvidia's Tegra 3, which uses a 4+1 configuration, where there are 4 high-performance cores, plus 1 low-performance, battery-saving core for low-end tasks. Except in Samsung's case it's 4+4, 4 high-performance cores, but also 4 low-performance, battery-saving cores for low-end tasks. I doubt there will be a noticeable difference between Exynos 5 and Snapdragon 600.
highy unlikely probaly the quad core variant
I'm 99.9% Sure the US version of the S4 will sport a Snapdragon.
It's not even sure yet what version we're gonna get over here in Switzerland yet, but since Samsung Germany announced they will be having a Snapdragon cause of LTE I guess it might be the same for us here in Switzerland.
In the EU the s4 will have 8 cores because there is not LTE. In the us the lte chip is very power hungry so a power hungry cpu and lts turned on will result in very bad battery life.
By the way, for those concerned about "lacking performance" of the quad-core Galaxy S4 versus the octa-core, check this out: http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/mobile/
Notice that number 3? It's running on a Snapdragon 600 quad-core! The octa-core Exynos 5 version is sitting at number 15.