Samsung introduces smartphone processor with six cores

Samsung has announced two new Exynos processors. It concerns the Exynos 5422 octacore, a small update to the 5420 that has found its way to the Galaxy S5, among other things. In addition, Samsung releases the Exynos 5 Hexa, which is already in the Note 3 Neo.

The Exynos 5422 is virtually identical to the existing Exynos 5420. The clock speeds of the big.Little octacore have been increased and Heterogeneous Multi-Processing for combining all active core combinations has been enabled. For example, the four Cortex A15 cores run at a maximum of 2.1GHz instead of 1.8GHz with the 5420. The four A7 cores now run at 1.5GHz instead of 1.2GHz. Samsung will use the Exynos 5422 for the Galaxy S5, but that will only be for a few markets: in most of the world, the smartphone will contain the Snapdragon 801.

In addition, Samsung releases the Exynos 5 Hexa, which has two Cortex A15 cores running at 1.7GHz, combined with four A7 cores at 1.3GHz. Again Heterogeneous Multi-Processing is activated. Further details have not yet been disclosed, although Ars Technica deduces some suspected specifications from previous reports. The hexacore comes in the Galaxy Note 3 Neo.