During Samsung’s latest financial earnings call we got some news about the Exynos 5250 chip that was announced back in November of last year. For those who need a refresher, it has a dual core ARM Cortex A15 processor that can be clocked at up to 2 GHz, it has an as yet to be announced graphics processor that promises to be 4x faster than the GPU inside the Galaxy S II, and best of all it’s made on a 32 nanometer process so it should run cooler than Samsung’s previous generation of 45 nanometer chips. Now we’ve been dying to know when this chip would actually end up in actual retail products, and while Samsung has declined to give any specific dates, they did mention that mass production of the Exynos 5250 would begin in Q2 of this year. Because of the amount of horsepower this thing is capable of delivering, it’ll end up in tablets first before it goes through some power optimizations so that it can be shoved inside a smartphone.
Before you get all excited, you should know that there’s an incredibly small chance that we’ll see any ARM Cortex A15 based chips hit the market this year. Clock for clock, the Cortex A15 is roughly 40% faster than the Cortex A9 that’s inside nearly everything from the iPhone 4/4S to the Transformer Prime, but it also eats up more power. How much, we don’t yet know due a lack of devices, but when and if Cortex A15 based processors come from the likes of Texas Instruments and the OMAP 5 or NVIDIA and the unannounced Tegra 4, then they’ll be in Windows 8 tablets first.
What’s Apple going to do then for their A6 chip that’ll likely make up the heart of the iPad 3 and iPhone 5? Are they going to go with a quad core Cortex A9 configuration like NVIDIA? We’ll find that out sometime in March, hopefully.