Imagination Technologies

Samsung is thought to be at work developing a quad-core chip to power the Galaxy S III, an addition to the Galaxy smartphone family expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress which runs February 27-March 1 in Barcelona, Spain. According to PocketNow, based on the source code at kernel.org, the new chip will be marketed as the Exynos 4412 and will feature four processing cores.

Samsung recently launched the 32-nanomenter Exynos 4212 chip with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processing core clocked at 1.5GHz and ARM’s quad-core Mali-400 GPU. Like Apple’s upcoming A6 chip (said to be manufactured by Samsung) and Nvidia’s Tegra 3 silicon, the rumored Exynos 4412 chip should take advantage of the four cores of the Cortex-A9 processor from ARM Holdings. Its closes competitor, however, will be a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core beast allegedly debuting early next year in the HTC Zeta smartphone.

Unlike the Tegra 3 chip which employs Nvidia’s own GeForce graphics processor or Apple’s A6 that is likely to tap Imagination Technologies’ next-generation PowerVR GPU, the Exynos 4412 could use the recently introduced Mali-T658 graphics unit which delivers up to ten times the graphics performance of the Mali-400 GPU and four times the GPU compute performance of the Mali-T604 GPU.

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Anandtech has published some interesting findings based on their extensive Samsung Galaxy S II review. It’s the first smartphone to use the graphics processing unit based on the Mali-400 core from ARM Holdings, a fables chip maker from the UK. In fact, Samsung has engineered and manufactured its own system-on-a-chip solution for the handset.

They call it the Exynos 4210 and it combines a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU core and the aforementioned Mali-400 GPU sporting four cores. The resulting performance, says Anandtech, is comparable to Texas Instruments OMAP 4 chip that incorporates Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX540 GPU core. However, the quad-core 1.2GHz Exynos 4210 probably won’t hold a candle to iPhone 5, which will likely carry the same dual-core processor-GPU combo as the iPad 2’s 1GHz A5 chip:

Samsung implemented a 4-core version of the Mali-400 in the 4210 and its resulting performance is staggering as you can see above. Although it’s still not as fast as the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 found in the iPad 2, it’s anywhere from 1.7 – 4x faster than anything that’s shipping in a smartphone today.

Interestingly, and per the GL Benchmark seen in the above image, the Exynos 4210 is more than twice as fast compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that runs Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chi. It’s also nearly four times speedier than iPhone 4’s 800 MHz A4 chip which has the PowerVT SGX535 GPU core. However, the 4210 falls short in the triangle throughput department.

The publication this this could be a big disadvantage over the iPad 2’s A5 processor that clocks nine times the graphics performance of the original iPad’s A4 chip. Triangle throughput is important in graphics-intensive games and will become key in “future games that may scale along that vector rather than simply increasing pixel shader complexity”. The video of Anandtech’s Samsung Galaxy S II review is right after the break.

Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com.

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