Samsung has unveiled two new Exynos chipset – Exynos 5422 and Exynos 5460 at MWC 2014. While the Exynos 5422 Octa Core processor is slight upgrade to Exynos 5420 which we saw in Indian version of Note 3, the Exynos 5460 is a more interesting new hexa core big.LITTLE chipset with HMP support.
Let’s explain HMP a bit further. The Exynos processor contains two set of 4 cores and only one set is used depending on the requirement of the task at hand (Cortex A15 does the heavy lifting, Cortex A7 takes care of the rest) With HMP processing ability and right software, all 8 cores can be used simultaneously, thus giving true octa core processing.
The Exynos 5422 also supports Hetrogeneous Multi Processing (HMP) ability. The 4 Cortex A15 cores are now clocked at 2.1 GHz and the remaining 4 Cortex A7 cores can be clocked up to 1.5 GHz. The chipset will provide with 34 percent performance boost, support up to WQXGA 2560 X 1600 resoution and can process 4K videos too.
HMP was also present in Exynos 5420, but Samsung has not used it in any of the available chipset. This might change this time with the new Exynos 5422 chipset, which is likely to appear in Indian version of the latest Samsung Galaxy S5. GPU is same as that on Exynos 5420 – Mali-T628 MP6.
The Exynos 5260 with HPM might find that sweet spot between processing power and power efficiency. We see huge potential for Exynos 5260 in upper mid range devices especially in markets like India. The processor features 2 Cortex A15 based cores clocked at 1.7 GHz and 4 Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.3 GHz. The GPU used is Mali T628 and memory bandwidth supports up to 12.8 GB/sec. The same chipset was seen in Galaxy Note 3 Neo launched recently.
