Samsung's new Exynos 5 Octa processor features 20-percent power boost

Last week, Samsung teased the update to its Exynos 5 Octa processor, promising that more details would be arriving this week. It's only Monday, and those details have already been published, showing more power than the current iteration and the use of a six-core ARM Mali-T628 GPU. We've got the rest of the details after the jump.

The Exynos 5 Octa processor was the first to utilize ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, featuring eight processing cores with four of them being utilized at a time. Four of the cores are Cortex-A15 offerings, while the others are Cortex-A7 cores. Depending on the needs of the device at any given time, either the more powerful four cores are used, or the lesser powerful.

The new Exynos 5 Octa offering still follows this, but both sets of cores have seen a boost in clock speed. The quad-core Cortex-A15 in the original has a clock speed of 1.6GHz, while the new version offers 1.8GHz. The A7 cores in the original were 1.2GHz, while the new chipset's cores are set at 1.3GHz. This represents a 20-percent increase in power over the original version.

Some other changes includes 14.9GB/s memory bandwidth alongside a dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, which Samsung says allows for rapid data processing, as well as support for full HD wifi display. For playing and recording 1080p video, the processor offers full HD 60fps video hardware codec. There's support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and Full Profile Open CL 1.1.

ARM's Media Processing Division Executive VP and General Manager Pete Hutton said: "ARM welcomes the latest addition to the successful Exynos Octa 5 series, which uses ARM's Mali GPU solution to dramatically improve graphics performance. ARM big.LITTLEā„¢ and ARM ArtisanĀ® Physical IP technologies continue to be at the heart of the Octa series and now complement the new functionality brought by ARM GPU Compute. This combination enables unprecedented capabilities in areas such as facial detection and gesture control, and brings desktop-quality editing of images and video to mobile devices."

SOURCE: BusinessWire