Although Samsung had quite some trouble with its first Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip powering the Galaxy S4 smartphone in some regions, Samsung apparently has high hopes for its Exynos chip family as it has now officially introduced the new and improved, Exynos 5 Octa 5420.

Based on pretty much the same design as the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip, the new Exynos 5 Octa 5420 features ARM's big.LITTLE design with eight cores. As we wrote before, it basically combines a high-performance quad-core Cortex-A15 cluster clocked at 1.8GHz with quad-core Cortex-A7 cluster clocked at 1.3GHz. The chip either uses one cluster or the other depending on how much power and performance does it actually need, thus, at least in theory, should provide more performance at lower power usage, or simply, much better efficiency.

When compared to the older Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5410 SoC, Samsung noted that some optimizations pushed the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 to be a 20 percent faster than the old chip, at least when it comes to CPU performance. The new 5420 also features a dual-channel LPDDR3 933MHz controller.

The main difference between the new Exynos 5 Octa 5420 and older 5410 is the GPU part. While using the PowerVR SGX544MP3 on the old chip, Samsung now decided to go for Mali T628 MP6, a six core GPU. According to details, the Mali T628 MP6 should have twice the power of the PowerVR SGX544MP3 used in the 5410 and also features support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and Full Profile OpenCL 1.1.

The new Exynos 5 Octa is already shipping to manufacturers but we guess that we will not see it in a smartphone anytime soon as production is expected to ramp up in August so it can only come in Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note III phablet, or at least some version of it.



Source: Samsungtomorrow.com.