Samsung has shown off the latest generation in its Exynos mobile processor family, claiming it will be first to market with chips based on the new ARM Cortex-A15 core design.
Exynos 5 will aim to leapfrog Qualcomm, Nvidia and the others, before they too transition from the current Cortex-A9 to the high performance, low power upgrade. Texas Instruments has actually already announced two OMAP models based on A15, and even shown a prototype tablet, but Samsung has the time to market advantage of an internal customer, in its own handset unit.
ARM first unveiled A15 in September 2010. It runs at up to 2.5GHz and can support up to 16 cores. The Exynos 5 Dual is not going that far. It has two cores running at 1.7GHz and will reduce size and energy consumption by using a 32nm manufacturing process (although Qualcomm is now down to 28nm). The power saving will be 30% over current 45nm Exynos models, says Samsung, and performance will be increased twofold.
Other improvements, naturally enough for Samsung, concern support for advanced displays –
stereoscopic 3D and resolutions up to 2560 x 1600, higher than the iPad HD or iMac. There is power saving here too, with PSR (panel self refresh) technology, which only sends visuals to a screen when an image is moving or changing.
The new processor also uses an ARM Mali T604 graphics processor with four cores. Samsung divides its GPU favors between ARM and Apple’s closer partner Imagination Technologies. The chip will also support USB 3.0 for fast transfer with other devices.
Samsung says the new chip has a whole new architecture and so will deliver more radical improvements than previous, more incremental updates. It is not clear when the Exynos 5 Dual will appear in devices, either Samsung’s or third party ‘ the upcoming Note 10.1 tablet, which will ship in September, will run on the quad-core Exynos 4. The product is already being manufactured and is likely to be in tablets and other gadgets early next year.
The Korean giant has been investing heavily in becoming a more broadly based semiconductor player, seeking new foundry customers, injecting $1.9bn into new 20nm and 14nm processes, and now adding server chips to its strengths in mobile and memory products.
The emerging trend for low power, ARM-based SoCs, deployed in parallel arrays for cloud servers, is attracting Samsung, along with Marvell, Calxeda and others. According to EETimes, the Korean firm is working on a microserver product for release in 2014 ‘ one of the few products for which it will not have an internal customer.
Samsung is a licensee of the ARM v8 64-bit specification so, unlike current microserver SoCs, it should go straight to 64-bit designs, widely expected to be the catalyst for this nascent segment ‘ and the challenge to Intel’s utter dominance of the data center (although Intel and partners have their own plans for low power, parallel processing designs based on Atom).