The main players in SoC cold war are Nvidia Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon. They manufacture mobile SoC and sell them to other manufactures. They have already reached quad core CPU, high end GPU, DDR3 RAM and all the other goodness you can ever imagine of.
Apple Ax and Samsung Exynos is also continued to improve their SoC, but I generally keep them out in SoC cold war since they are not selling those to other manufactures. Recently Samsung came out with latest Exynos 5 Octa with 8 CPU cores. You can find the same chip in Galaxy S IV (i9500) international version. This is going beyond all the boundaries compared to other SoC. Let’s see what sort of place it has in the SoC cold war.
Benchmark Results of Exynos 5 Octa
CPU: 1.6 GHz // Quad Core // Cortex A15 & 1.2 GHz // Quad Core // Cortex A7
GPU: PowerVR SGX 544MP3
RAM: 2 GB // DDR3
Quadrant: ~12700
An Tu Tu: ~28100
We are talking about 8 Core CPU. So you must be expecting way higher benchmarking results compared to other SoC. But result is not exactly the same. It’s slightly better than Snapdragon 600 and way lesser than Nvidia Tegra 4, the current winner. You can see the benchmarking results of above SoCs here.
As it appears, the objective of packing 8 CPU cores in Exynos 5 Octa is not to make it super powerful, but to make it less power hungry. In order to check whether it’s working we have to collect lots more data about battery life in Galaxy S IV. It may come up in few weeks.
If you are planning to buy a Galaxy S IV and stuck with the decision which version to buy, now you have your answer. There won’t be much performance difference regardless of number of CPU cores. Quad core version comes with LTE in USA carriers, so that would be a better choice than 8 core version which doesn’t have LTE.
Tags: #Samsung #Smartphone #Tablet