Google officially announced Android 5.0 Lollipop yesterday, which takes advantage of 64-bit processors such as the Tegra K1 chip in the new Nexus 9 and other devices. Samsung is also jumping in on the opportunity with its new 64-bit Exynos 7 Octa processor, which was just announced. We don’t typically see Samsung’s Exynos chips in smartphones here in the US, where Qualcomm remains the dominant player, but there’s a lot to like about this chip. It has four ARM Cortex A57 cores and another four ARM Cortex A53 cores that are designed for power efficiency. The chip will fire up various cores depending on the task at hand.
Samsung officially announced the Exynos 7 Octa today, the second mobile SoC from the manufacturer to use a 20nm process. The South Korean vendor is touting significant performance enhancements to the tune of 57 percent over the Exynos 5 Octa, which is achieved by using 64-bit CPU cores. The Exynos 7 Octa features four ARMv8 Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration, which means that any assortment of cores can be active based on the use case. The SoC comes with a Mali T760 GPU, which is claimed to offer an increase in performance of 76 percent over the T628MP6 GPU used in the Galaxy Alpha. Other features include support for 2560 x 1600 and 2560 x 1440 displays, ability to shoot high-definition content from both front and back cameras simultaneously and output 4K resolution to TVs.