Samsung announces new Exynos 5 Octa processor with 20 percent more CPU grunt and doubled 3D graphics performance

Last Friday we reported that Samsung was teasing an upgraded version of its Exynos 5 Octa chipset. Today, the company has finally unveiled the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 variant which now reverts to using ARM’s own Mali graphics stack, instead of the PowerVR GPU found in the Exynos 5 Octa that powers the Galaxy S4. It also doubles down on CPU performance and improves it by a further 20 percent.

The new chipset gets the new Mali-T628 MP6 GPU, which was announced last year. It is a massive improvement over the PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU. Both the ARM CPU stacks also now have higher clock speeds. The Cortex A7 quartet now has a clock speed of 1.2GHz, while the Cortex A15 cores now are clocked at 1.8GHz.

The presence of dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz gives the SoC a memory bandwidth of 14.9 Gbps which also helps it add full HD Wi-Fi display support. There’s also a new image compression engine that will make multimedia loading more energy efficient and ensures that when the chipset is tied with a higher resolution displays with that have up to 2500×1600 pixels it delivers better battery life.

All this also means that it is better equipped to compete with the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU, whose Adreno 330 GPU can decode and encode 4K content. Generally, it was noticed that while Exynos 5 Octa benchmarked better than the current generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 CPU, its real world performance lagged behind especially in terms of battery life. Considering, the Snapdragon 800 CPU is considered to be a greater leap Samsung had to respond in kind.

Obviously, it has not ironed out most of the major chinks in its armor, but for now at least owing to its improved graphics stack, it will be better for smartphone gamers. While Samsung has not revealed which devices or which OEMs may opt for the CPU, we totally expect it to land on some variants of the Galaxy Note III.