Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Promises Better Performance on Higher-Resolution Displays

Samsung’s Galaxy S III came to the market with a quad-core Exynos 4 application processor inside, one of the best performing in the world.

However, it appears that soon this CPU will become a second runner, as Samsung themselves managed to build a new, better processor for mobile devices, the Exynos 5 Dual. Built using the 32nm technology, the new chip comes not only with support for better performance than its predecessor, but it also supports higher resolution displays, of up to WQXGA (2560×1600). “When users realized the advantages of browsing the web, watching HD video, and playing 3D games on a mobile device, they demanded displays with higher resolution and better multimedia performance,” Samsung notes in a blog post. The Cortex-A15 dual-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) has each core running at 1.7GHz, and sports a DMIPS (Dhrystone MIPS – million instructions per second) 40 percent higher than Cortex-A9 core. However, the CPU was not designed to be used inside smartphones, but it should prove a great option when it comes to tablet PCs, Samsung notes.

“Designed with the 32nm lowpower process, Exynos 5 Dual provides performance features such as dual core CPU, highest memory bandwidth, WQXGA display, 1080p 60fps video hardware, 3D graphics hardware, Image Signal Processor, and high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.0 and SATA3,” the company notes. The chip also features 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth with 2-port 800MHz LPDDR3 (Exynos 4 came with 400MHz LPDDR2), which can easily handle 1080p video en/decoding, 3D graphics display, and other heavy traffic operations. It also comes with support for dynamic virtual address mapping, which means that software engineers will be able to take full advantage of its memory resources.

“The best 3D graphics performance with a variety of APIs, such as openGL ES 2.0 and Halti, that can be used for GPUs with openCL full profile. 1080p 60fps video performance, which is critical for 3D stereoscopic playback/record and wireless display,” Samsung also notes. The processor includes eDP controller and PHY transceiver to save power, which sports hardwired logic to support Panel-Self-Refresh (PSR) protocol. Additionally, it features Image Signal Processor (ISP) of 8M pixel 30fps, USB Host/Dev3.0, and HSIC with PHY transceivers. Another interesting spec of this processor is the inclusion of DirectX 11 support, which means that it would make it inside Windows 8-based devices as well.

Samsung Exynos
Image credits to Samsung

Posted in: Hardware, Mobile Phone, Preview, Tablet