Samsung unveils Exynos 5 Octa chip with ARM technology

Samsung has launched its latest top-of-the-range smart device processor – Exynos 5 Octa – which it says has 20% more power than its predecessor.

The South Korean electronics giants claimed that the four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 cores and as many 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A15 processors in the chip allow it to boast 20% more CPU processing power than in the earlier Exynos 5410, used to power some versions of its Galaxy S4 handset.

The firm said that the mobile chip is capable of almost doubling the graphical prowess of the devices. The chip uses a new image-compression solution to reduce the power consumption.

The extremely powerful chip offers “desktop-quality” video editing and supporst 1080p high-definition video playback at 60 frames per second, it said.

Exynos 5 is the first production-ready chip to feature ARM Holding’s latest GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) architecture. The potential of GPUs has not remained limited to video games graphics and they are widely being used to handle the general computing tasks today.

Though GPUs are relevantly slower at performing single calculations than CPUs, their advantage is that they can carry numerous calculations at the same time. Specifically they are capable of handling the highly “parallelizable” tasks such as running augmented reality apps and applying filters to photographs effectively.

Using GPU isn’t very popular among the smart device manufacturers and the vast majority of smart devices use ARM-designed CPUs. The Cambridge-based ARM accounted for about 20% of the overall Android phone sales last year.

The newly-developed chip will replace Exynos Samsung’s current octa-core processor as the firm’s flagship chip. Octa-core processor was used in Samsung’s flagship device Galaxy S4 but despite of its remarkable success, Exynos chips failed to attract the attention of most of tech firms, who continue to favor Qualcomm Snapdragon and Nvidia Tegra chipsets.

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