Samsung, unlike most handset vendors, manufactures many of the components that go inside their devices. Take the Galaxy S III as an example. The 720p AMOLED display? Samsung made. The Exynos 4 quad core chip? Samsung made. The 1 GB of RAM and the built in storage? You get the idea. Today the company has finally published details about their next generation processor, the Exynos 5. Chances are that this puppy is going to end up inside the Galaxy S IV. So with that in mind, let’s run through what makes it special.
Starting with the transistors themselves, the Exynos 5 will be made using a 32 nanometer process. Why is this important? Because smaller transistors mean smaller chips, which means less power usage, less heat, and more battery life. And whereas the Exynos 4 inside the Galaxy S III uses four ARM Cortex A9 cores, the new Exynos 5 has a pair of ARM Cortex A15 cores. Don’t be fooled, less cores isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The ARM Cortex A15 is supposed to deliver double the performance of an ARM Cortex A9 core running at the same clockspeed. Speaking about clockspeed, the Exynos 5 maxes out at 1.7 GHz.
Moving onto the GPU, Samsung has decided to go with a quad core ARM Mali-T604. Said GPU is supposed to be 5x faster than previous generation Mali GPUs, but until we benchmark the Exynos 5 we can’t really compare it to what’s currently on the market. All we know is that the Mali-T604 will let Samsung use screens that have a resolution of 2560 × 1600 pixels, and it’ll even let you record 30 frame per second movies at a resolution of 8 megapixels. That’s certainly overkill, but we’re not complaining. Other things worth mentioning, the Exynos 5 supports USB 3.0, 800 MHz DDR3 memory, and SATA III.
Now the important question: When will you be able to buy a device with an Exynos 5 inside. Like we said earlier, assuming the Galaxy S IV uses this chip, then you can expect to wait almost a whole year. We wish it could come sooner, but as the saying goes, good things come to those who wait, right?
[Via: The Verge]