Samsung’s next Galaxy smartphone is going quad-core.
On Thursday, the South Korean electronics maker introduced its Exynos 4 Quad processor for phones and tablets. The chip’s first deployment will be inside a new smartphone to be unveiled next week, widely expected to be the Galaxy S III.
“Already in production, the Exynos 4 Quad is scheduled to be adopted first into Samsung’s next Galaxy smartphone that will officially be announced in May,” the hardware maker said in a statement. “Samsung’s Exynos 4 Quad is also sampling to other major handset makers.”
Samsung didn’t say what other phone and tablet makers are looking into using the new Exynos chip, but the company did say that its quad-core CPU, which can clock as high as 1.4GHz, should be more energy efficient than rival options (reading between the lines: Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip).
The most recently released Tegra 3 phone is the HTC One X (though the U.S. version of this phone will feature a dual-core processor from Qualcomm). The One X should be the Galaxy S III’s stiffest competition once Samsung releases the smartphone in May — so get ready for benchmark battles between Nvidia and Samsung once the S III arrives.
Following Nvidia, Samsung is the second mobile chip maker to enter the quad-core game. Qualcomm has its own Snapdragon quad-core mobile chips in the pipeline, and Texas Instruments’ offerings currently top out with dual-core CPUs.
Samsung is making hay of the fact that the Exynos 4 Quad is the first quad-core mobile chip in the world to make use of a low-power technology called High-k Metal Gate, or HKMG. Thanks to HKMG, the new quad-core chip will consume about 20 percent less power than the previous-generation Exynos 4 Dual, which had just two cores.
With more processing cores to handle computing tasks, Samsung says its newest CPU will offer a “PC-like experience” that will enable users to do more in less time. The company offered up the example of a streaming video being handled by one core while other cores update apps and scan the web for viruses in the background.
