Here’s a surprising late night treat. Samsung Electronics just introduced the 1.4 GHz Exynos 4 Quad (Exynos 4412, quad-core A9) and said it is “scheduled to be first-adopted into Samsung’s next Galaxy smartphone that will officially be announced in May.”
Rumors and speculation had suggested that Samsung would use the quad-core Exynos 4412 in the Galaxy S III, but we were not expecting them to reveal the final specs until the Unpacked event on May 3rd.
“The quad-core processor offers phenomenal multitasking abilities surpassing any single or dual application processor,” Said Taehoon Kim, VP of Samsung LSI marketing. “Given the diverse functionalities consumers are demanding from their mobile devices today, the Exynos 4 Quad meets those high-performance needs while keeping power consumption very low.”
Samsung’s Exynos 4412 is built on their new 32nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process technology, which promises two-times the processing capability over the 45nm process based Exynos 4 Dual while consuming 20-percent less power.
The new Exynos 4 Quad will use the same Mali-400 GPU found in the Exynos 4 Dual, but Samsung has increased the clock speeds from 266 MHz to over 400 MHz. Recent leaked benchmark scores show that the Exynos 4 Quad should offer the fastest graphics performance, besting NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4.
All of this sounds awesome, but we still don’t know the final specs for the US version of the Galaxy S III. Some rumors have suggested that Samsung could still use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 since it features an integrated LTE modem. The Exynos 4 Quad does not feature an integrated modem, but Samsung has already produced modems that work with LTE networks (like the modem found in the Verizon Galaxy Nexus).
We had been hoping that Samsung might shock the mobile industry and go with their even newer Exynos 5250 processor. It features dual-core A15 CPU cores instead of quad-core A9, which should give it twice the processing power, but it appears that Samsung will save that for their next smartphone.
Samsung could have also felt the pressure from NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 and decided they needed to match the number of cores to keep up in the marketing battle.
Overall, this is still an exciting announcement. Samsung’s next Galaxy should easily become the fastest Android phone when it is released and it could have the longest battery life depending on the capacity of the battery that they stuff in there.
May 3rd can’t come soon enough.
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