Samsung Reveals 2 GHz Cortex-A15 Exynos 5250 Chip
Samsung has revealed the Exynos 4212 Cortex-A9-based chip and the Exynos 5250 Cortex-A15-based chip, both capable of Full HD (1080p) video and 3D graphics.
During the eighth annual Samsung Mobile Solutions Forum held at the Westin Taipei, Taiwan, Samsung officially revealed the Exynos 4212, a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 application processor designed on its 32-nm High-K Metal Gate (HK/MG) low-power process. Samsung said this process node is specifically tuned to offer "a competitive, cutting-edge platform" with double the logic density and a 30-percent lower power-level over the previous process generation.
According to the company, the new Exynos processor features an enhanced GPU that is capable of delivering 50-percent higher 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung. It also incorporates a "portfolio" of advanced codec accelerators that support digital still images, video recording and play-back at 1080p full-HD resolution, an image signal processor and an on-chip HDMI 1.4 interface.
"As innovative technologies appear on the mobile landscape, the market continues to embrace further developments and performance acceleration in mobile computing," said Seh-Woong Jeong, executive vice president of System LSI sales & marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung is addressing this trend with its powerful low-power Exynos family of processors based on its proven design technology and cutting-edge process technology for performance and power improvements at the system level."
Samsung also previewed a 2 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 application processor, the Exynos 5250, also designed on its 32-nm process. The company said that the processor is twice as fast as a 1.5 GHz A9 design without having to jump to a quad-core layout. A memory bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s also helps the SoC achieve a new maximum resolution of 2506 x 1600.
Details surrounding the new SoC are rather slim, but the company said that video recording will be capable of handling 1080p videos at 60 frames per second. 3D will be supported by an HDMI 1.4 port, and the chip itself will also support SATA, USB 3.0 and other I/O standards. That said, Samsung said the new Exynos 5250 is designed for high-end tablets and will not go into sample mode until 2Q12 - products based on the SoC are expected to ship in late 2012.
As for the current Exynos 4212, Samsung will be sampling the application processor to select customers in Q4 2011.

This thing is still a year away, assuming everything goes as planned.
This thing is still a year away, assuming everything goes as planned.
And it's only dual core and 4W TDP for the entire platform including graphics processor and everything else. Imagine what a quad core higher clocked with more graphics pipelines version can.
Ivy Bridge killer? Well, probably not but the race is on.
Which is a phone, not tablet, yet this chip is designed for tablets.
With 2-3mm lens, right. It's about time to start wasting more memory for crappy video that hardly deserves 1/4th of that resolution at that FPS.
are those cortex cpu similar as x86 cpu?
in a sense that in a possible near future shift to cortex cpu architecture instead of x86?
Noob question:
are those cortex cpu similar to x86 cpu?
in a way that in a possible near future, we could shift to cortex cpu architecture instead of x86?
So doesnt change much of anything..
Software at least needs to be recompiled to run on ARM. In most cases you'll also need to rewrite part of the software. Apple managed to gradually shift Mac OS X from PowerPC to x86 quite smoothly by providing software emulation (technically "binary translation") and universal binaries.
If Microsoft does it right, they could gradually move Windows from x86 to ARM. (provided that desktop class ARM processors exist, of course.)
Umm... where're you getting all this info from?
How the heck do you know that is can do more computation than a similarly clocked Core 2 Duo? I highly doubt it, except for the graphics processor which I'm sure can compute a ton of SIMD instructions per second.
Don't state facts unless you can back them up. If you can back them up, please provide a source!
The future would be to me like:
Imagine a docking station, and a plastic transparent window on your desktop, both connected via cable or wireless. Plug in your phone, and keyboard into the docking station, and you have a fully functional Core2quad 3Ghz computer!