Samsung announced the first Octo-core ARM processor, and the first using big.LITTLE technolocy at CES 2013 in January, and today the company has announced a new Exynos 5 Octa (Exynos 5420) with a six-core ARM Mali-T628 MP6 GPU (interestingly ditching PowerVR SGX544MP3 in the process), as well as 4 ARM Cortex-A15 cores at 1.8GHz, and 4 Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3GHz.
Samsung claims Mali-T628 MP6 boosts 3D graphic processing capabilities by over two times compared to the PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU used in Exynos 5410. The ARM GPU also supports General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) to accelerate complex and computationally intensive algorithms or operations, with API such as OpenCL 1.1. This product also supports OpenGL ES 3.0 to enable the processing powered requires by high-end, complex games.
Even it’s still using 4x Cortex-A15, 4x Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE processing configuration, the company claims CPU processing capability has been improved by about 20 percent over Exynos 5410 by increasing the CPU cores clock. As I found out recently, Exynos 5410 big.LITTLE processing SoC implementation is far from optimal as you can only use a cluster of 4 processor at the same time (either all 4 Cortex A7 or Cortex A15), and hopefully, Samsung has improved the situation with Exynos 5420 by allowing per-core switching. Sadly, they do not mention what has been done with big.LITTLE at all in the press release. [Update: Several unofficial online sources (see comments) indicate that Exynos 5420 does indeed fully support “Global Task Scheduling” (GTS) with 8 independent cores]
Exynos 5420 processor also features a memory bandwidth of 14.9 GB/s paired with a dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, enabling an fast data processing and support for full HD Wifi display. The processor also support hardware video decoding and encoding at 1080p60.
Exynos 5 Octa is said to be sampling to customers now, and is scheduled for mass-production in August 2013.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
