Samsung Reveals Quad-Core Exynos 4 for Galaxy S3 Superphone

From DailyTech:
With the Galaxy S3 super-phone from the world's top Android phonemaker, Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KS:005930), set to launch at a special event in London, UK on May 3, the hot question on everyone's mind is what might be inside. Samsung might have tipped its hand regarding the system-on-a-chip (SoC) driving the phone, today announcing its quad-core variant of the fourth generation of Exynos CPU.

While Samsung continues to play with Texas Instruments Inc.'s (TXN) OMAP processors (a potential acquisition target), the South Korean firm still makes much of its CPUs in-house. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that Samsung also manufactures virtually all the CPUs for its smartphone arch-nemesis Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) iPad and iPhone.

Even as the firm is rumored to be preparing its fifth generation Exynos 5 chip for PC offerings, the Exynos 4 quad core -- clocked at 1.4 GHz -- represents the company's direct response to its competitors quad core designs like NVIDIA Corp.'s (NVDA) Tegra 3 and Qualcomm Inc.'s (QCOM) SnapDragon 4. Samsung claims that despite adding two cores, the die-shrink from 45 nm to 32 nm allowed it to drop power draw by 20 percent, while doubling computation power.

The new chip is built on Samsung's mature 32 nm high-K metal gate (HKMG) technology, a process refinement that helps fight leakage, the power losses that plague the semiconductor world's ever-shrinking circuits.

Each core on the chip can be switched off via so-called "hot plug" technology. The chip also packs dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) for its cores, allowing them to be selectively underclocked based on workloads.

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