While details are still sparse as we await the official start of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona tonight/tomorrow, it appears that Samsung plans to announce a new quad-core processor as part of its Exynos line. It will be the first Samsung SoC based on 32nm technology rather than the 45nm currently in production and will be available in both quad- and dual-core variant.
According to the story over at Unwiredview it will be available in frequencies ranging from 200 MHz all the way up to 1.5 GHz while offering lower power consumption than current options. I am curious how this actually stacks up though as we have seen that Tegra 3 doesn’t REALLY offer lower power consumption and longer battery life even though that was a promise from NVIDIA. It definitely can offer less power consumption per performance unit, but in the end battery life is king for these mobile devices.
What about graphics performance? The story had this to say:
The new Exynos comes paired with the latest version of Samsung’s own graphics chip, which has 4 pixel processors and 1 geometry engine with 128 KB L2 cache. The graphics support OpenGL ES 2.0 and can generate up to 57 MPolygons/s.
Samsung claims that the new processor will offer 26% more performance compared to Exynos parts based on the 45nm process and I assume they are referring to dual-core vs dual-core results. Other claims include battery life improvements of "up to 50%" – we’d love to see it but we’ll wait for actual devices to ship and showcase it before really getting excited.
The good news is that quad-core performance will be coming to more devices and NVIDIA won’t be the only SoC designer on the block offering them. The use-cases for quad-core performance on a mobile device, phone or tablet, may still be in question though we never doubt the software side of the equation to utilize as much horsepower as it is provided.