At long last speculation can finally end. Samsung has officially announced the availability of its Exynos 4412 quad-core SoC and, within its press release, confirmed that the chip is heading to the next GALAXY smartphone, that's to be released in May.
With all four cores running, the chip is expected to clock in at 1.4GHz, though Samsung has confirmed that the chip also has the ability to switch off an entire core and scale both voltage and frequency, with the firm's wording suggesting that the chip will go beyond 1.4GHz under scenarios that don't fully utilise all four cores. Thanks to a jump from 45nm down to 32nm, Samsung claims that the CPU has twice the performance of the Exynos 4210 found in the GALAXY S II, whilst consuming 20 per cent less power.
In its press release, the firm didn't go into much detail over the graphics card, so it may be reasonable to assume that suggestions of an overclocked Mali-T400 were correct, however, benchmarks claiming to be of the GALAXY S III have leaked onto the web and are showing promising graphical performance, with the supposed S III besting Tegra 3-based devices and Apple's iPhone 4S, whilst fighting toe-to-toe with the iPad 3.
Something Samsung did take note to mention, however, was that the quad-core variant of the Exynos series would feature a new codec and image signal processing engine, allowing for 30 frame-per-second playback of multiple 1080p HD video formats and enhanced camera functionality.
