Samsung Announces Two New Quad HD Supported Exynos Chips

Previous rumors lead us to believe that Samsung will be announcing a new range of Exynos processors at Mobile World Congress, however the full details are quite a lot different to originally expected. Two new SoC’s have been announced, with varying levels of hardware capabilities.

Firstly, despite various reports, neither device is based on a 64-bit architecture, and secondly, they don’t seem to be related to the Infinity branding, despite Samsung’s recent marketing attempts to inform everyone of the ‘Exynos Infinity.’ So what is inside these two new Exynos chips, and why aren’t they in the Galaxy S4 yet?

The first new Exynos chip is the Samsung Exynos 5422 Octa – this SoC is designed for high end devices, and has eight cores, and uses the same big.LITTLE architecture seen in previous Exynos processors. What this means, is that even though it does have eight cores, only four will be active at once.

Four cores will be for high end performance, and the other four will be used for low-powered processing whilst the phone is mainly idle, hence the big.LITTLE name. The high end side of this chip will be four ARM cortex-A15 cores clocked at up to 2.1GHz, and the low end for small tasks will be powered by four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at up to 1.5GHz. According to Samsung, the new chip will have up to 34% higher performance than the previous Exynos chip, partially due to Samsung’s new Heterogeneous Multi Processing technology, and optimized form of the big.LITTLE architecture.

The second Exynos chip is the Exynos 5 5260, which uses a six core processor which consists of two 1.7GHz Cortex-15 cores for high end tasks, and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 cores for low end tasks.

No details have been given on what products these devices will support, however both chips have support for Quad HD displays, which suggests smartphones by Samsung later in the year will have Quad HD displays. Perhaps a new version of the Galaxy S5, or the next Note device.

Source: Samsung