Samsung enhances Exynos 5 Octa processor

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd has expanded its Exynos product family with a mobile octacore processor that improves graphic performance. Driven by a six-core ARM Mali-T628 GPU processor, Samsung's application processor gives designers a powerful, energy efficient tool to build multi-faceted UI capabilities directly into the system architecture, indicated the firm.

Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa (product code: Exynos 5420), based on ARM Mali-T628 MP6 cores, boosts 3D graphic processing capabilities that the company said are more than two times greater than the Exynos 5 Octa predecessor. The latest member of the Exynos family is able to perform General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) accelerating complex and computationally intensive algorithms or operations, traditionally processed by the CPU. This product also supports OpenGL ES 3.0 and Full Profile Open CL 1.1, which enables the horsepower needed in multi-layer rendering of high-end, complex gaming scenarios, post-processing and sharing of photos and video, as well as general high-function multi-tasking operations.

The Exynos processor is powered by four ARM Cortex-A15 processors at 1.8GHz with four additional Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3GHz in a big.LITTLE processing implementation. This improves the CPU processing capability by 20 per cent over the predecessor by optimising the power-saving design.

In addition, the multiple image compression (MIC) IP block inside this SoC successfully lowers the total system power when bringing pictures or multimedia from memory to display panel, continued Samsung. This feature results in maximising the usage hours of mobile devices with a high-resolution display such as WQXGA (2500x1600), in particular when browsing the web or doing multimedia application requiring the frequent screen refresh.

The Exynos 5 Octa processor also features a memory bandwidth of 14.9GB/s paired with a dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, enabling an industry-leading fast data processing and support for full HD WiFi display. This processor also incorporates a variety of full HD 60fps video hardware codec engines for 1080p video recording and playback.

The latest family of Exynos 5 Octa is sampling to customers and is scheduled for mass-production in August.