[Galaxy S 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
Or, as is typical in the development stage of many products, the s/w coding got ahead of the decisions on h/w so they coded for both eventualities. Since none of us work for Samsung any assumption of "panic" is a wild ass guess. Both Octa and S-600 don't come with an in-built baseband. S-600 already has the necessary interfaces and drivers while they'd have to be written for Octa. Maybe that work couldn't have been done in time considering all the different LTE markets that would need to be coded for. That, or it was just simpler and easier to use S-600 in LTE markets. They used Octa/LTE in Korea, their home town market, so I highly doubt they did that if it wasn't considered their "premium" offering. Last year for the SGS3, shipments were 1/3 LTE and 2/3 HSPA. This year it's the reverse. So favoring S-600 over Octa could be purely a market driven decision based on the larger availability of LTE this year. I agree something could have gone wrong that caused a last minute shift to S-600 and away from Octa but some stray code found in the kernel isn't a smoking gun.

Has anyone here run a large-scale product development group? Or worked on a h/w or s/w project that's the scope of launching a major electronic device? It's always chaos. Especially the last mile. The SGS4 could have been more chaotic than other devices Samsung's released but since none of us were on the project teams we're just guessing that last minute decisions were made because of crisis and error.

This is the way big.LITTLE is supposed to work. I'd like to understand what's missing and what replaced it.

There are only two operating models. Why is Samsung choosing to implement one over the other "screwing" anyone? The dev community not having a toy to play with doesn't mean Octa's a commercial failure because 99.9% of i9500 owners don't give a crap that it could be operating in two modes but instead is only operating in one.

Does anyone here know what the production goals are for Octa? And over what time frame? Without knowing that how could 1/3 of SGS4's shipping with Octa be considered a failure? Qualcomm licenses ARM technology as the basis for all their designs. So the chip after S-800 will be big.LITTLE also as ARM's spent two years developing it and spent several billion dollars to do so. Exynos 5410 is the first and only commercial implementation of big.LITTLE. I highly doubt it's perfect as V1 of anything rarely is. But all this speculation of failure and use of adjectives like "chaos" is based on a very narrow and shortsighted view of what's basically a long view game.

Here are the white papers on big.LITTLE; three from ARM and one from Samsung. The Samsung paper's been authored by their Principal Engineer who has a PhD. When someone here who's got a PhD that’s being paid $500K+ a year and responsible for the s/w running hundreds of millions of devices writes a similar paper with as much fact and detail in it showing why big.LITTLE's a failure I'll be all ears. Until them I'm hoping the N3 has Octa because (at least to me) the long term benefit of having a big.LITTLE equipped device outweighs the short-term gains of going with Qualcomm's interpretation of a five-year old ARM design. For a site that's supposed to be technical you guys sure have a sour view on new and emerging technologies.

http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/big_LITTLE_Final_Final.pdf

http://www.arm.com/files/pdf/Advances_in_big.LITTLE_Technology_for_Power_and_Energy_Savings.pdf

http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/Software_Techniques_for_ARM_big.LITTLE_Systems.pdf

http://www.arm.com/files/downloads/Benefits_of_the_big.LITTLE_architecture.pdf