Upcoming silicon

The upcoming chips show a trend wherein performance alone ceases to be the driving factor. Mindsets have changed and battery life is just as important as performance. The new chips deliver by featuring low-power cores intended to take on the processing strain in stand-by mode.

Samsung Exynos 5250

Samsung’s Exynos 5250 packs two ARM Cortex-a15 processors clocked at 2 GHZ. The dualcore chip is claimed to offer about twice the CPU performance of existing products that are equipped with a pair of ARM 1.5GHZ CortexA9 processors. It is built using a a 32nm low-power high-k metal gate process.

TI OMAP5430

The flagship of TI’S new OMAP5 series, this 28nm SOC integrates two ARM Cortex-a15 Mpcores that are clocked at 2 GHZ each, two Cortexm4 cores that are used as accelerators and CPUS that power the device when in low-power/ standby mode. According to TI, the A15 architecture is about 50 per cent faster than the preceding A9 cores and the entire chip is about three times faster than the previous generation (OMAP4, which isn’t available yet).

The graphics engine is based on the Powervr SGX544MPX core as well as TI’S own 2D graphics engine. Users can run 1080p video at 60 frames per second and convert 2D 1080p video into S3D in 1080p in real time. TI claims that it has enough horsepower to support a 2D digital camera with up to 24-megapixels resolution or 12-megapixels 3D