Exynos 5250

A mockup of an 11.6-inch Galaxy Tab versus a 10.1-inch model, courtesy of TabTech.de

Samsung allegedly plans to announce a bigger, 11.6-inch Galaxy Tab tablet powered by Ice Cream Sandwich at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The show is scheduled to run Feb. 27 to March 1, 2012. According to German-language TabTech.de, the new Tab will not be just bigger; it should take advantage of Samsung’s 2GHz dual-core Exynos 5250 chip that was announced last November.

Given the 5250’s four times graphics performance compared to the Exynos 4210 silicon, the 11.6-inch Galaxy Tab might be the first tablet with an ultra high-resolution display. The Exynos 5250 is based on the Cortex A15 architecture from fables semiconductor design firm ARM Holdings and Samsung said it is capable of delivering 14,000 DMIPS. This could be the reason alone for a bigger Tab.

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Samsung is readying an improved version of the Exynos dual-core chip that will enable next year’s smartphones and tablets to pack in 3D stereoscopic displays with ultra-high resolutions, in addition to the faster graphics and speedier CPU performance. The new chip will be called the Exynos 5250, V3.co.uk reports, and will utilize the Cortex A15 architecture from fables semiconductor design firm ARM Holdings.

It should clock in 14,000 DMIPS, Samsung said, twice the number of instructions compared to the typical ARM Cortex A9-based mobile chips such as Apple’s A5 silicon powering iPad 2 and iPhone 4S or Samsung’s own commonly used dual-core 1.4GHz Exynos 4210 silicon. Samsung did not say what graphics core the 5250 uses beyond mentioning a quadruple jump in graphics performance over the Exynos 4210. The 4210 uses the pretty darn fast Mali-400 GPU from ARM sporting four cores.

Note that Samsung two months ago announced a revised version of the Exynos 4210 chip, dubbed the Exynos 4212. It sports a 1.5GHz clock speed and a dual-core Cortex A9 processing core from ARM, among other things. The Exynos 5250 should make its way into Samsung’s high-end smartphones and tablets in the second quarter of 2012, when the 5250 is expected to go into mass production.

Four times faster graphics processing will let the new Exynos 5250 chip drive tablet displays with WQXGA resolutions of up to 2,560-by-1,600 pixels. Apple too is rumored to upgrade its market-leading iPad with a QXXGA display early next year with. Production of the Retina Display for iPad 3 has already started, the rumor has it. The Cupertino, California company is said to source panels from Samsung Electronic, LG Display and Sharp.

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