It is made for powerful high-end tablets and superphones

Mar 15, 2013 07:59 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has Tegra 4, Qualcom has Snapdragon 800 and, now, Samsung has officially introduced the Exynos 5 octa mobile processing platform for tablets and other high-end mobile devices.

8-core builds seem to be turning into a sort of niche market right now. While NVIDIA and Qualcomm are taking things slow, Advanced Micro Devices has provided Sony's PS4 with an 8-core Jaguar build and, now, Samsung is providing the tablet market with an 8-core ARM build.

Called Exynos 5 Octa, it boasts the ARM big.LITTLE architecture based on the Cortex-A15 central processing unit (CPU). It was seen at MWC 2013, but the official release has only happened how.

ARM big-LITTLE is “built for efficient handling of multitasking abilities for high-end mobile devices today.”

There are four powerful Cortex-A15 cores for when applications need horsepower, and four Cortex-A7 cores for lighter workloads (lower energy use).

Up to 70% energy can be saved compared to a platform made only of Cortex A-15. And with the ARM architecture being efficient by nature, that means a significantly longer battery life for everything the chip is used in.

Graphics-wise, the performance is over two times better than on Exynos 4 Quad, enough for WQXGA (2560x1600) resolution.

Furthermore, the Exynos 5 Octa incorporates a full HD 60fps (frame per second) video hardware codec engine, plus 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth interface (enabled Full HD streaming over Wi-Fi).

Finally, Samsung has included e-MMC (embedded multimedia card) 5.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces, a first in the industry, plus an embedded 13 mega-pixel 30fps image signal processor interface.

“High processing performance based on multi-cores has become an essential factor for advanced mobile devices, and what users expect more is how long and seamlessly they can enjoy smart mobile computing experiences,” said Taehoon Kim, vice president of marketing, system LSI business, device solutions division, Samsung Electronics.

“With the new mobile platform driven by the Exynos 5 Octa processor, which heralds and fulfills such expectations, consumers will be able to experience a new level of mobile computing in a few months.”