Samsung today announced a new Exynos 5 Octa SoC (product code : Exynos 5420) . This latest addition to the Exnos product family will meld an eight-core application processor (quad Cortex-A15 @1.8GHz, quad Cortex-A7 @1.3GHz in ARM big.LITTLE configuration) and a six-core ARM Mali-T628 GPU processor. This new mobile processor will be able to employ General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) acceleration. The new Exynos 5420 offers at least 20 per cent faster CPU processing and double the "3D graphic processing capabilities" of its predecessor.
"Demand for richer graphic experiences is growing rapidly nowadays," said Taehoon Kim, vice president of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. "In order to meet that demand from both OEMs and end users, we developed this processor which enables superb graphical performance without compromising power consumption."
Samsung, with its new Exynos 5420, is aiming to bring greater processing capabilities to mobile devices. Support for OpenGL® ES 3.0 and Full Profile Open CL 1.1 should help the processor be useful for "rendering complex gaming scenarios", photo processing and smoother multi-tasking. Furthermore the ARM GPU Compute functionality should make it possible to implement facial detection and gesture control in mobile devices.
We are informed that the power optimising design extends to the multiple image compression (MIC) IP block inside this SoC, thus total system power usage is lowered when displaying images on the device display, extending the portability of the device. The Exynos 5420 can support a full HD Wi-Fi display thanks, says Samsung, to its memory bandwidth of 14.9 gigabytes per second paired with dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz.
When will we see this SoC in shipping devices? Samsung says its customers are currently sampling the chip and it will go into mass production next month. Could it be used in the next Samsung Galaxy Note phablet?
