Samsung Dual-Core Processors announced

We’re living in a world where technology is advancing at a never before seen rate. Something which is new today might be old news tomorrow. In this aspect, the smartphone market really manages to take the cake. Not only do new models appear on a weekly basis, occasionally we see new devices every day, but they get improvements, they get updates and the sorts. One element which always manages to keep my attention when thinking about smartphones is the CPU market. Last year we saw the birth of the Tegra 2 chipset in a smartphone. Texas Instruments announced their upcoming OMAP 5 platform and nVidia is working apparently on their tri core chipset series. So what about Samsung?

The company announced recently that their latest platform is well underway. Seh-Woong Jeong, executive vice president of marketing for the South Korean company, said that “Application processors for the mobile market are one of the flagship products in our semiconductor business”. This was regarding an announcement tied to their upcoming release of their dual-core processors. He continued by saying “We are excited to introduce the brand name of Exynos for Samsung’s application processor family. As consumers demand more from their mobile products, Samsung’s Exynos chips will be the power inside enabling the coolest HD multi-media features with even longer battery life.”

Smart and green is the basis for their Exynos application processor family. Smart is targeted at their high-performance aspect while the green part is referring to the low power requirements of their processor line. This new naming system will be applied first of all to their Orion processors line which was announced last year in September. With the name of Exynos 4210, the processor will be seeing the production line in the following month and will be a 1 GHz dual-core CPU.

Some of the specs can already be seen in the chipsets “preview” made by Samsung. The application processor is based on the ARM platform, being a dual ARM Cortex-A9 based processor. The CPU and memory architecture will give out the “world’s best” low power dual core processor in 45 nm LT process to run at a frequency of 1 GHz per core. There is a system level performance and power optimization built into the architecture which will allow DDR3 memory, Backlight control and low power audio DSP. The graphics GPU will be able to render 3,200 million pixels per second, which is almost the same as the pixel fill rate for a Gainward GeForce 8400 GS with 256 MB of RAM. The GPU will be able to use a large memory bandwidth of up to 6,400 million bytes per second and will have native WVGA dual display as well as simultaneous 1080p HDMI output.

The only question which arises from this “green” dual core processor is if the battery life will be increased as dramatically as Samsung suggest. If it will be a noteworthy change they might be able to hold their ground when facing nVidia’s Tegra 2 which proved its worth already, Qualcomm’s upcoming dual-core processors which are clocked at 1.2 GHz per core as well as the monsters planning to be released by Texas Instruments with their 2 GHz per core performance. The green aspect is the only one which would be able to make the CPU line competitive in my opinion because with the announcements of nVidia’s upcoming tri core processors, the market will be flooded with cheap multi core smartphone sized chipsets (not to mention Intel’s Oak Trail platform). Until next time, do you wish to be green or do you wish to be fast?1

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