Samsung shows quad-core Exynos chipset

Samsung officially showed off a new Exynos chipset with four Cortex-A9 cores and a new GPU at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The new chip boasts both performance and battery improvements.

It's built using a 32nm process rather than the 45nm process used for current Exynos chipsets. Each CPU core can be switched off and even half of the 1MB L2 cache can be disabled to preserve power.

According to Samsung, this results in 26% performance boost compared to their current Exynos chipsets. Energy saving for CPU-bound tasks goes up to 45%, while rendering 3D takes up to 48% less energy.

The new chipset uses the latest GPU (presumably from the Mali series), with one geometry engine and four pixel processors.

The chipset will be available with clock speeds for the processor ranging from 200MHz to 1.5GHz. There's support for both LPDDR2 and the newly announced LPDDR3, and a dual-core version of the chipset is planned, too.

Samsung will be showing off their new Exynos at the MWC and we might even get to see a product with it, but we'll have to wait a couple days more to find out.

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Qualcomm S4 chipset benchmarks promise amazing performance

A fresh batch of benchmarks of Qualcomm's S4 platform show just how powerful the new Krait cores are. The tests were run on a reference platform, but since we don't care about the rest of the hardware (screen, camera, etc.), just the chipset performance, these result are a good indication of what to expect.

Qualcomm S4 uses Krait cores, two running at 1.5GHz in the case of the MSM8960 that was used in the reference platform. Krait is better in almost every respect than the old Scorpion cores and as a result performance has skyrocketed in both single and multi threaded tests.

Linpack reports a whopping 106.8 MFLOPS in single-threaded mode and 218.2 MFLOPS in multithreaded mode. For comparison, a Tegra 3 chipset with four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.3GHz score 135.9 MFLOPS in the multi-threaded benchmark.

Linpack benchmark results for Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 and Tegra 3 (single and multithreaded)

SunSpider and BrowserMark results top even the highly optimized Samsung Galaxy Nexus, though not by as much as we would have expected.

The GPU inside the Qualcomm MSM8960 is an Adreno 225, even though S4 chipsets are supposed to use Adreno 3xx GPUs. Still, on paper the 225 matches the PowerVR SGX543MP2, a.k.a. the GPU found inside the iPhone 4S.

GLBenchmark however tells a different story - when run in offscreen mode (so that it can be forced to render graphics at 720p resolution, regardless of the actual screen res), the Adreno 225 beats the Mali-400MP4 inside the Galaxy S II (but not by much) and falls quite short of the SGX543MP2. It lags behind the Tegra 3's GPU too.

GLBenchmark results for Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 and Tegra 3 (Egypt and Pro)

Hit the source link to check out more benchmark results and an in-depth analysis of the MSM8960-based reference platform over at AnandTech.

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