Yesterday, Samsung unveiled a brand new Galaxy device dubbed the Galaxy Alpha. We’d been hearing a lot about the device over the last few weeks, with rumors heating up through the second half of July and into August. As is usually the case, we heard enough about the phone to not really be surprised when it made its official debut yesterday. What was surprising was the chip inside the device.
The Octa-core Exynos 5430 is Samsung’s first Exynos manufactured on the 20nm process. It’s important to note, however, that this is not Exynos 6 but an updated version of Exynos 5. It features the same Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE 4+4 core configuration as the Exynos 5410 (GS4), Exynos 5420 (Note 3) and Exynos 5422 (GS5), though with different clock speeds.
Like its predecessors, the chip is capable of utilizing all of the chip’s cores at once and Heterogeneous multi-processing or task scheduling sees “bigger” 1.8 GHz cores take care of larger tasks while threads requiring less power are relegated to the “LITTLE” 1.3 GHz cores. We’ve seen this in action in every flagship Samsung device over last year, when the 5410 debuted in the Galaxy S4.
On the graphics side of things, the Exynos 5430 uses the same ARM Mali-T628 MP6 GPU we saw in the Exynos 5422 (Galaxy S5) but this time it’s clocked to 600 MHz instead of 695 MHz.
Samsung’s first 20nm processor is inside what is arguably a borderline mid-range phone. Samsung says the chip is designed for devices requiring power efficiency in high-resolution 2560 x 1600 (WQXGA) and 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) displays, though the Galaxy Alpha’s display is a lower-resolution 1280×720 pixel Super AMOLED display. For now, we’re looking to IFA Berlin to see which of Samsung’s other devices will be based on 20nm chips. The company is rumoured to be launching the Galaxy Note 4 at the show, and that device is rumored to packs a 2560 x 1440 WQHD screen.
On the other hand, the launch of the 5340 comes just one month after the unveiling of Samsung’s Exynos ModAP, a quad-core chipset with a 4G LTE modem on board. That chip is built on the 28nm process and while it hasn’t yet appeared in any devices, there was some speculation that it would appear in the Note 4. Now that Samsung has an octa-core chip that supports the QHD panel the Note 4 is rumoured to have, it seems unlikely the device will be based on the ModAP chip. What it does show is Samsung’s commitment (however slow) to better competing with Qualcomm, which has dominated the market for LTE-capable mobile SoCs.
[source]Samsung[/source]
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