Just a week before its Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012 event where it will announce "the next galaxy smartphone," Samsung has officially announced what SoC will be inside. The answer is Exynos 4 Quad, which is no doubt the Exynos 4412 we've heard about before. Exynos 4 Quad is built on Samsung's 32nm HKMG process and consists of 4 ARM Cortex A9s running at up to 1.4 GHz. Samsung reports 20% lower power with Exynos 4 Quad over Exynos 4 Dual (4210), though it doesn't say at what clocks or workload. In the past, Samsung has claimed 40% lower power on 32nm HKMG compared to their 4xnm process.

Samsung also notes that Exynos 4 Quad has power gating on all four A9s, in addition to per core frequency and voltage scaling. This is an interesting move away from the one frequency plane shared across all cores architecture of Exynos 4210, and to the aSMP (asynchronous SMP) architecture similar to what Qualcomm has so far exclusively used. Samsung doesn't note what GPU blocks are inside Exynos 4 Quad, however Mali400MP4 at higher clocks seems likely. Samsung notes that the Exynos 4 Quad is both package (12 x 12 x 1.37 mm) and pin compatible with the 32nm Exynos 4 Dual (4212). Lastly, Samsung Semiconductor hasn't updated its A9 series catalog page, however I woud fully expect the new SoC to pop up before day's end. 

Update: Samsung Semi has also uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating the Exynos 4 Quad and Exynos 5 Dual SoCs. Exynos 5 is shown powering a WQXGA display, and there are some clear shots of the Exynos 4 Quad running GLBenchmark Egypt.

Source: Exynos 4 Quad Minisite, Korea Newswire

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  • snoozemode - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Tegra 3 supports DDR3-L up to 1500 MHz so I don't think the single-channel is much of a bottleneck.
  • r4ir4org - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    Actually this would be more like Intel's tick. Tock is for major architecture changes. Tick is for process node changes.
    http://www.r4i-r4.org
  • krumme - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link

    I was hoping for A7, but a powergated samsung process 32hkmg A9 is fine, even though it will be running under 20% most of the time i use it. Thankfully i didnt get the A15 with some mali xxxx, as i dont use my phone for drawing fractals or playing crysis.

    You cant have it all, so i preordered mine.

    Heck, i would buy it, no matter what is inside, as long as it doesnt carry the Apple label - haha
  • tipoo - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link

    Is it the same Mali 400, or something new?

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