Samsung used this week’s ISSCC Conference in San Francisco to preview its quad-core Exynos chip. It runs on two or four ARM Cortex A9 cores with speeds up to 1.5 GHz. Samsung has not integrated the processor with the baseband, leaving the Korean powerhouse a step behind Qualcomm (QCOM) in this area. But Samsung says the chipset will get the job done for cutting-edge mobile devices, increasing speed and performance without draining the battery.
The quad-core Exynos is likely to launch in earnest at next week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, but don’t look for handsets sporting the chip just yet. Samsung’s “superphones” powered by quad-core are expected later this year, and the company is also expected to sell the chipset to other handset makers. Analysts predict that by later this year, more mobile apps will be ready to take advantage of the performance boost offered by quad-core chips.
Samsung says the newest Exynos chip will offer a significant performance boost over the Samsung Galaxy S II’s Exynos 4210. The new chip is produced using the latest 32nm process, which is designed to provide better performance scaling than the 45nm process used for the 4210. The new chip may make it into the Samsung Galaxy S III, a new Android phone expected later this year.
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