Samsung Unveils the Exynos 5 – Eight Cores and Tremendous Battery Life

As reported before, both Nvidia and Qualcomm have announced their latest system on chips, the Tegra 4 as well as the Snapdragon 600 and 800 respectively, and although these chipsets are impressively powerful, the upcoming Exynos 5 chipset is definitely going to make a bigger impact.

An octa-core Samsung CPU has been rumored before, but now it's been made official and yes, the Korean manufacturer is expected to fit this eight core chipset into future Samsung products throughout year 2013.

Nonetheless, something to keep in mind is that this particular Exynos 5 chip is not necessarily twice as powerful as the Tegra 4 or the Snapdragon 600 / 800 simply because it has twice the number of cores. The reason for that is because the Samsung chipset consists in two processors that will not actually work simultaneously in order to increase performance.

Instead, the Exynos 5 chip will boast a quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 chip and a separate Cortex-A15 quad-core CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz. The Cortex-A7 will handle less demanding tasks in order to conserve battery life, whereas the A15 chip will take over more demanding tasks such as gaming, streaming HD videos or browsing the web whenever necessary.

The results are quite impressive and this octa-core CPU really sounds like a perfect combination between well-managed processing power and battery life. Samsung claims that the upcoming Exynos 5 SoC will be able to save 70% battery life over the ongoing Exynos 4 CPU that is currently powering the Samsung Galaxy S3.

The octa-core CPU will be built using a 28nm process, but according to Samsung, future chipsets will be built with 20, 14 and 10nm die shrinks. It's unsure when it will happen exactly, considering the fact that the 14nm process is expected to be introduced in 2014 whereas the 10nm die shrink in 2016, so we'll have to wait and see how the story will develop.

Nonetheless, the Exynos 5 is very impressive as it is and as long as we'll have a lot of processing power at our disposal while not having to care about battery life (or at least not as much as we care today), then I'm sold, and the best part about Samsung's upcoming chipset is that it will not only end up powering smartphones, but notebooks and perhaps ChromeBooks as well.

Via: Phandroid