Published in PC Hardware

Samsung has a new Exynos 5 Octa SoC

by on23 July 2013

big.LITTLE, Mali T628 graphics

Samsung’s original Exynos 5 Octa had a rather troubled birth. The chip doesn’t appear to have been ready on time and it lacked LTE, so many Galaxy S4s shipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 instead.

However, Samsung is preparing a new octa-core based on ARM’s big.LITTLE implementation. The Exynos 5420 features four Cortex A15 core clocked at 1.8GHz, along with four Cortex A7 cores for power efficiency. It is said to be 20 percent faster than its predecessor in terms of CPU performance.

It should end up with more GPU performance as well. It features ARM’s new six-core Mali T628 graphics and to the best of our knowledge it is the first SoC to use the new GPU. The graphics performance is said to be more than two time better than the original Octa.

The only question is where will Samsung use it first? A new superphone perhaps, or a proper tablet, with a 2560x1600 screen, as the GPU appears to be optimized for that particular resolution.

The chip is currently sampling to customers and it should enter mass production in August, which means it probably won’t end up in the new Note phablet.

Rate this item
(0 votes)