In one week Samsung will hold a press conference in London to unveil their 2012 hero device, the Galaxy S III. May 3rd can’t come any sooner to be honest, because I’m frankly fed up with the amount of rumors flying out from all four corners of the internet. Bitching and moaning aside, today the South Korean handset vendor and component supplier has announced the “Exynos 4 Quad”. As the name implies, it’s a quad core chip. It’ll feature four ARM Cortex A9 processors that can be clocked as high as 1.4 GHz. Unlike NVIDIA, which scales the frequency of all four cores of the Tegra 3 simultaneously, meaning all four cores run at the same speed, Samsung’s quad core chip will allow each of their cores to have their own clock speed. That’s something Qualcomm is doing with the S4 Snapdragon. What does this mean in real world use? Samsung says that their “Exynos 4 Quad” uses 20% less power than the dual core Exynos inside the Galaxy S II. Much of that is due to the fact that the “Exynos 4 Quad” is built using 32 nanometer transistors versus the 45 nanometer transistors used to make the 4210. Anyway, what makes the announcement of this quad core monster exciting? This quote:
“The application processor is a crucial element in providing our customers with a PC-like experience on mobile devices. Samsung’s next Galaxy device, which will be officially announced soon, offers uncompromised performance and ground breaking multi-tasking features, thanks to Exynos 4 Quad’s powerful performance and efficient energy management technology,” said Hankil Yoon, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy Team, Samsung’s Mobile Communications Business.
You read that right, Samsung has just revealed that the Galaxy S III will indeed have a quad core processor. We don’t know anything else about the “Exynos 4 Quad”, such as what GPU it has and how fast it’ll be clocked, but seven days isn’t that long of a wait to find out.