Samsung introduces first 20nm Exynos soc

Samsung has announced a new octacore soc in its Exynos line that will be produced at 20nm. The Exynos 5430 features a combination of Cortex A15 and Cortex A7 cores, and is used in the recently announced Galaxy Alpha smartphone.

As with previous Samsung octacores, two processor clusters are used: four powerful Cortex A15 cores at 1.8GHz and four economical Cortex A7 cores at 1.3GHz. These can be switched on and off individually, depending on how heavily the soc is loaded. On the GPU level, Samsung again opts for the Mali T628 design from ARM and the total memory bandwidth of the soc is 17GB/s. That probably means that the maximum memory speed has been boosted to 1066MHz and Samsung still uses a dual-channel 32bit bus.

The Exynos 5430 is the first system on a chip that Samsung manufactures on its 20nm hkmg process; until now, the Korean manufacturer used a 28nm hkmg process. According to Samsung, the new process yields a 25 percent power saving, assuming the chips are otherwise identical. It is expected that competitor TSMC, which makes chips for Qualcomm, among others, will soon roll off the first 20nm chips.

Samsung puts a lot of emphasis on the multimedia capability of the soc. For example, there is hardware support for decoding the hevc/h265 codec, which is used when encoding 4k images. According to Samsung, that kind of material can be sent to the HDMI input of a UHD TV. Furthermore, panel self refresh is supported, so that the soc does not have to constantly send new frames to the screen when displaying static images. That should save energy.

The first phone in which the Exynos 5430 is used is the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, a new member of the Galaxy line with a partly metal housing. That device was announced earlier this week and should be released in the Benelux sometime in September.