After teasing the evolution of the Exynos 5 Octa-core processor on Twitter, Samsung have finally revealed the new and improved Exynos 5 5420, which like its predecessor packs eight cores in an ARM big.LITTLE architecture, however, the 5420 has 4 Cortex-A15 clocked at 1.8GHz and 4 Cortex-A7 at 1.3GHz while the SoC is based on Mail-T628 six-core GPU. Samsung claims that it’s the first ever processor in the industry to do so and that it packs 20 percent more processing power and two times better 3D graphics rendering than the older generation.
The press release says that the Exynos 5 5420 can accomplish this improvement in performance without compromising power consumption by optimizing the power-saving design, meaning it won’t have better battery life, it will have the pretty much the same as before with better performance and while that’s a good thing, I’m hoping we start focusing on battery life rather than performance. Current chips are fast enough for everyday activities, but battery life still has a lot of room for improvement.
The 5420 also has a monster memory bandwidth of 14.9 gbps paired with dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, giving the processor support for Full HD WiFi display coupled with a variety of Full HD 60 fps video hardware codec engines. The SoC is also optimized in such ways that the result could allow for hours of usage in devices with high-definition displays like those with WQXGA which is 2500 x 1600. We’ve seen leaked a new line of tablets from Samsung under the name of Galaxy Tab 3 Plus with that resolution and obviously the Nexus 10, also made by Samsung. To sum it up, you shouldn’t have any problem with any video in any common resolution. Ever.
Samsung says that the new generation of Exynos is being sampled to customers and that mass production for these chips will begin in August, so unless the Galaxy Note III is not being released until the end of the year, it probably won’t be carrying this processor like we thought it would be, meaning that it will most likely have the same Exynos 5 5410 SoC that some markets saw in the Galaxy S4, which is no slouch at all.
Samsung will show its new baby of the Exynos 5 family at SIGGRAPH 2013 in the ARM booth so you might want to check it out if you happen to be at the show.