Samsung announces Exynos5 octa-core chipset
NVIDIA had its moment to shine earlier in the week, and Qualcomm had its own announcements to make for 2013. Now, Samsung’s looking to turn things up a notch with its own Exynos series of chipsets. Samsung has announced the Exynos5, an octa-core chipset that makes use of some pretty interesting techniques to provide optimal battery life while delivering best-in-class performance.
The chipset features two quad-core SoCs, with one being an ARM Cortex-A15 based implementation clocked at 1.8GHz, while the other is an ARM Cortex-A7 implementation at 1.2GHz. The former will be used for the usual CPU-intensive tasks such as gaming, web browsing, HD video playback and more. If you aren’t doing these things then the phone will favor the weaker (but still powerful), more battery friendly set of cores.
The initial product will come in a 28nm flavor, but Samsung is continuing to work to bring that down to 20, 14, and then 10nm over time. With 70% battery savings over the Exynos 4 chipset this thing should scream while providing extremely long battery life at the same time. Imagine a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with a 3,300-3,500mAh battery coupled with this chipset — I’m already watering at the mouth.
Of course, phones and tablets aren’t the only things Samsung will look to stuff these things into. Samsung is also starting to use Exynos5 inside its line of netbooks, including the already-available ChromeBook. We’re not sure when or if Samsung will use this particular chipset in a netbook anytime soon, but it certainly is a possibility.
The technology is called “big.LITTLE,” a cute play on what you might use to call a Java package or method in an Android app. Big, little, or anything in between — we don’t care what it’s called, we just want to see it in phones at some point this year.