Samsung Announces Quad-Core Processor for Next Galaxy Smartphone

Published on: 26th Apr 2012

­Samsung Electronics has shown off a quad-core application processor built on the High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process technology. The processor is based on the ARM Cortex platform and operates at 1.4Ghz.

Samsung said that it offers double the processing power at a 20 percent lower power bill over its predecessor, the 45nm process-based Exynos 4 Dual.

Multi-core processing delivers enhanced performance, enabling users to accomplish more tasks in a shorter period of time. For example, a task such as streaming video can run on one core while the other cores update applications in the background, connecting to the web and scanning virus-check simultaneously.

Benefitting from a use case where the parallel processing and workload sharing among the four cores is necessary, the Exynos 4 Quad is particular well suited for heavy-load applications such as 3D games, video editing, and calculation-intensive simulation.

To improve power efficiency, Samsung adopted hot-plug functionality to support on-off switching for each core as well as the per-core dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), which offers a dramatic reduction in power consumption by adapting different levels of voltage and frequency when changing workloads.

Having identical form factor measurements (12mm X 12mm X 1.37 mm), the Exynos 4 Quad is pin-to-pin compatible with the 32nm process based Exynos 4 Dual, allowing mobile device designers to immediately adopt the new solution without additional cost, engineering or design efforts.

In addition, the new processor incorporates a full HD 30 frame per second video hardware codec engine for high resolution 1080p video recording and play-back, an embedded image signal processor interface for camera functionality and an HDMI 1.4 interface.

Already in production, the Exynos 4 Quad is scheduled to be adopted first into Samsung's next Galaxy smartphone that will officially be announced in May.

Samsung's Exynos 4 Quad is also sampling to other major handset makers.

 

Tags: [samsung electronics]  [galaxy]