Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa SoC is ready for mass production

Samsung has confirmed that its mobile Exynos 5 Octa chip will be ready to kick off mass-production during the second quarter of 2013.

As TG Daily previously reported, the Exynos 5 Octa is built around ARM’s eight-core big.LITTLE architecture and Cortex-A15 CPU.

“The Exynos 5 Octa is the world’s first mobile application processor to implement the new concept of processing architecture, big.LITTLE to offer optimal core use,” an ARM rep explained.

“By housing a total of eight cores to draw from – four powerful Cortex-A15 cores for processing-intense tasks along with Cortex-A7 quad cores for lighter workloads – the Exynos 5 Octa enables mobile devices to achieve maximum performance.”

Indeed, the above-mentioned architecture offers up to 70 percent energy saving when performing various tasks, compared to using Cortex- A15 cores only.

According to the Samsung rep, the latest Exynos processor will be manufactured using the company’s latest 28-nanometer (nm) HKMG (High-k Metal Gate) low power process and power-saving design, which increases the power efficiency of the processor by minimizing the static current leakage.

“With today’s advanced display technology transitioning toward ever higher and sharper resolutions, the Exynos 5 Octa is powerful enough to drive WQXGA (2560×1600) display, the best crystal-clear resolution currently available for mobile devices, enabling users to enjoy crisper video images on their premium smartphones and tablets,” said the rep.

“And by adopting e-MMC (embedded multimedia card) 5.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces, the new Exynos application processor boasts fast data transfer speed, a feature that [facilitates] faster booting, web browsing and 3D game loading.”

Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa also incorporates a full HD 60fps (frame per second) video hardware codec engine for 1080p video recording and play-back, an embedded 13 mega-pixel 30fps image signal processor interface for high-quality camera functionality and 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth interface that enables full HD Wifi display.