Samsung has unveiled an upgraded Exynos 5420 Octa chip as they announced last week. The new Exynos Chip is faster that the previous 5410 chip that was announced at the CES 2013 earlier this year. The Exynos 5420 Octa chip has fours Cortex A15 chips clocked at 1.8 GHz and four Cortex A7 chips running at 1.3 GHz in a big.LITTLE processing implementation. The first Exynos 5410 Octa chip used in the global variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is also based on Samsung’s ARM big.LITTLE architecture with four Cortex A15 chips clocked at 1.6 GHz and four Cortex A7 chips running at 1.2 GHz.
The main difference between these chips is the GPU. The Exynos 5410 Octa used a tri-core PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU and the new 5420 Octa uses a six-core ARM Mali T628 MP6 GPU. Samsung claims that the CPU performance would be 20 percent greater and the GPU performance would be two times greater than the first Exynos 5 Octa chip. It also has support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and Full Profile Open CL 1.1 for multi-layer rendering in gaming, post-processing, sharing of photos and video and multi-tasking operations. The first Exynos 5 Octa chip is based on 28nm High K Metal Gate Process technology, so this is also likely to be based on the same technology.
The new Exynos 5 Octa processor also features a memory bandwidth of 14.9 gigabytes per second paired with a dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, better thab the Exynos 5120 Octa which has a memory bandwidth of 12.8 gigabytes per second with a dual-channel LPDDR3 memory at 800MHz. It support full HD at 60 frames per second for 1080p video recording and playback.
The new Exynos 5420 Octa is currently in sampling stage and the mass-production is expected in August. Since the Galaxy Note 3 is expected later this year, it is likely to be powered by the new Exynos 5 Octa chip.