CES 2013: Samsung brings eight-core Exynos chip to smartphones

The mobile processor trifecta has been completed thanks to Samsung unveiling a new iteration of the Exynos chip. The Exynos Octa chip, based on the ARM big.LITTLE/Cortex A-15 architecture, is designed to be a low powered, high performance mobile processor, according to Engadget.

According to Samsung, the performance of the chip is twice than that of anything available in the market today when it comes to 3D gaming. While the company hasn't unveiled full details about the chip yet, this chip may be able to run dual quad-core setups on a 28nm process.

Samsung has unveiled the new Exynos 5 Octa chips (image credit: Engadget)

Nvidia unveiled its own next-gen chip—the Tegra 4—earlier this week. The new processor boasts a number of improvements, including 72 graphics cores and better imaging capabilities. The CPU is based on ARM's latest Cortex A-15 architecture, which gives it a considerable boost compared to the current ARM Cortex A-9 based Tegra 3 quad-core chipset. The new chip sticks to Tegra 3's 4-plus-1 design. In this design, a fifth smaller core helps regulate the power among the four more powerful cores.

The other major chips unveiled at CES were Qualcomm's new 2.3GHz quad-core processors. Qualcomm has unveiled the new Snapdragon 600 and 800 chips at the ongoing CES 2013. The new SoCs are going to be making an appearance in high-end devices and Smart TVs in the next six months.

Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 800 offers 1.75 times better performance than the S4. While this is yet to be seen, the specifications of the new SoC include 28nm HPm fabrication, an upgraded Hexagon V5 digital signal processor, 800MHz LPDDR3 memory, Krait 400 architecture running at clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU.

The Snapdragon 600 seems to be an upgraded version of the S4 with some tweaks to the architecture, including a 1.9GHz maximum clock speed, an Adreno 320 GPU and LPDDR3 memory. Both the 600 and the 800 include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Miracast HD at 1080p and 150Mb/s LTE with Advanced Carrier Aggregation.