Samsung Unveils New Exynos 5 Octa Chip With 20% More CPU Power, And Developers’ Conference In October

Samsung (KRX:005935), which will join the ranks of Apple and Google in holding its own developers’ conference in San Francisco in October, has announced the launch of its new Exynos 5 Octa chip with more CPU power and 3D graphics capabilities, on Tuesday in Seoul.

The new member to the Exynos product family comes with the product code 5420 and is based on a six-core ARM Mali T628 GPU processor for the first time in the industry. The company claims that the six-core GPU inside the new system on a chip (SoC) boosts its 3D graphic processing capabilities, which are twice as fast as the current Exynos 5 Octa.

“ARM big.LITTLE and ARM Artisan Physical IP technologies continue to be at the heart of the Octa series and now complement the new functionality brought by ARM GPU Compute,” Pete Hutton, executive vice president and general manager, Media Processing Division, at chip maker ARM, said in a statement on Tuesday. “This combination enables unprecedented capabilities in areas such as facial detection and gesture control, and brings desktop-quality editing of images and video to mobile devices.”

The new Exynos processor is powered by four ARM Cortex-A15 processors at 1.8GHz with four additional Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3 GHz in a big.LITTLE configuration. Samsung claimed that the package improves the CPU's processing capability by 20 percent over its predecessor by optimizing the power-saving design.

In addition, the multiple image compression IP block inside the chip lowers the total system power when bringing pictures or multimedia from memory to display panel.

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, landing support for full HD Wifi display. The new processor also incorporates a variety of full HD 60 frames per second video hardware codec engines for 1080p video recording and playback.

According to Samsung, the fresh Exynos 5420 variant is currently being sampled by the company’s customers and is scheduled for mass-production in August.

Tuesday’s announcement from Samsung came hot on the heels of media reports saying that the South Korean tech giant will hold its first-ever developer conference in San Francisco in October.

Samsung has created a teaser website for the conference, which offers e-mail signups. Although the company has not disclosed much about the upcoming developers’ meet, a Samsung representative told Ars Technica that it will be a “cross-product, cross-platform” event.

Most of Samsung's smartphones use Android with the company's own TouchWiz UI overlay. Samsung also uses the Windows Phone operating system from Microsoft, and makes PCs and netbooks featuring both Microsoft's Windows and Google's Chrome OS.

Samsung also experimented with Linux-based Bada platform for smartphones, which it later turned into Tizen, collaborating with Intel.

The taglines for the event reveal that the event will offer developers the opportunity to “engage with industry leaders” and “learn about new Samsung tools and SDKs.” The full site is expected to go live later this summer, while the conference is scheduled to take place from October 27 through October 29.

Samsung's first developer conference will feature hardware as well as software products while established industry events such as Google's I/O and Apple's WWDC events focus mainly on software.