Samsung has announced its Exynos 5250, a system on a chip (what is an SoC?) whose dual-central processors (CPUs) are based on ARM’s A15 design. This particular chip will run at 2GHz, and this is interesting because at equal frequency it should be up to 2X faster than the current Cortex A9 design used in most high-end SoCs. This is possible because the Cortex A15 can execute two instruction simultaneously which is similar to a proven feature that was introduced on PC with the original Intel Pentium. Combined that with double the frequency and there is a great potential for a very fast chip.
Samsung also mentioned that the graphics processor update will lift the maximum resolution to 2506×1600 pixels, and that the memory bandwidth has doubled to 12.8GB/s. This is needed to handle the extra resolution, but more bandwidth is helpful in general as it is always an issue for high-performance applications.
The video recording is said to be capable of handling 180p videos at 60 frames per second (FPS), and we like the sound of that. Finally, stereo 3D will be supported thanks to an HDMI 1.4 port, and the chip itself also supports SATA, USB 3.0 and other I/O standards which could be handy to build… a Windows 8 ARM-based computer for example…
That said, the availability is still far away. Samsung may “sample” chips sometime in the second half of 2012, which would translate to an actual product availability in Q4 2012, or possibly in Q1 2013. Let’s wait and see. [Samsung press release (in Korean)]