We know that Samsung is getting ready to unleash their new beast of a chip, the Orion, which some say may even land in the Nexus S. However, I have my doubts that the chip is ready right now. They might go with Tegra 2 for that. Nexus S aside, we have Galaxy S2 and the next Galaxy Tab to be excited about, and it seems that the next Galaxy Tab will indeed get the new Orion chip.
Samsung said that the Orion will have 5x the graphics performance of Hummingbird, but I find it a little hard to believe that. Perhaps they meant 5x the overall performance of Hummingbird? That I could believe since it’s a dual core and it’s based on Cortex A9, and obviously the graphics performance will be bumped as well.
The Orion will use the Mali GPU from ARM. If there is to be some competition to Tegra in 2011, at least it’s from ARM itself. I’d rather Mali become more popular since ARM makes it, than see the iPhone GPU, the Power VR SGX become even more popular than it is. Personally, I’m still rooting for the Tegra platform, but in the long-term I’d probably prefer that ARM makes not only the ubiquitous CPU’s, but also the GPU’s, that all manufacturers can use.