Octa-core Windows 10 phones expected to arrive soon

January 21 marked an important milestone for Microsoft as the Windows 10 Next chapter event took place and revealed an amazing amount of new information concerning the future of the popular OS on both desktop and portable devices. One of the things that became abundantly clear is that us tech giant is really making progress and investing in its new One Windows philosophy.

Windows 10 on smartphones and tablets will essentially share the core of the full distribution and more importantly will support a uniform app ecosystem that allows the same applications to be used seamlessly across the entire range of Windows 10-powered devices. This is all very exciting, but even though Microsoft cleared the smoke around a lot of aspects of the new OS there are still some pressing questions of availability and future devices. As we have already reported, the new OS will surely be available for the Microsoft Lumia 435, 735 and 930 and if Microsoft keeps its word, most other current Lumia devices as well. This is an admirable decision, but we can’t help that the Microsoft mobile family is severely lacking on flagship models lately. Luckily this might change pretty soon.

This is more than a simple hunch and is backed up by a few recent facts. First, the extended hardware support that was promised to arrive with Windows Phone 8.1 GDR2 is now set to ship with Windows 10, so support will be present. From there it is just a matter of producing the right hardware and a recent GDC session, titled “Sustained Gaming Performance in Multi-Core Mobile Devices (Presented by Microsoft)”, may just confirm such plans:

Modern mobile devices and smartphones are reaching the computing capabilities reserved until recently for desktop PCs. Windows 10 phones and tablets with 8 CPUs and very powerful GPUs are expected soon. Despite significant progress in reducing power consumption these devices are able to draw more power under sustained load than can be safely dissipated with current passive cooling technologies. Windows 10 and the hardware it runs on are designed to safely handle such situations, mostly by reducing the system performance – which could affect game-play negatively. Learn to counter this effect by designing games that achieve sustained thermal-to-quality tradeoffs in these systems.

This sounds promising enough, but for the time being “near-future” is a very vague concept. However we are still hoping to see new flagship Lumia phones in 2015.

Source | Via