The high-powered cat is out of the bag: Samsung has released a whitepaper detailing the company's upcoming dual-core Exynos 5 Dual mobile CPU, the first chip based around ARM's beefy Cortex-A15 architecture. Despite having two fewer CPU cores than the Cortex-A9-based Exynos 4 Quad CPU found in Samsung's flagship Galaxy S III and forthcoming Galaxy Note 10.1, the 1.7GHz Exynos 5 Dual should deliver plenty of punch thanks to the potent technology powering the processor.
Samsung's legal battle with Apple revealed the company's plans to build an 11-inch tablet with a high-definition screen to rival the iPad's Retina Display. The Exynos 5 Dual is likely the processor that will be powering that tablet; its quad-core ARM Mali-T604 GPU can handle WXQGA-level resolutions up to 2560x1600 -- twice the resolution of most current Android tablets -- and supports stereoscopic 3D, OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.1 and DirectX 11. Could Windows 8 tablets lie in Samsung's future?
ARM's website claims that the Mali-T604 "delivers up to 5x performance improvement over previous Mali graphics processors," but no independent tests have confirmed that yet. The Exynos 5 Dual also packs in 800MHz LPDDR3 RAM, which has enough bandwidth to pump out those high-res graphics without bottlenecking, as well as power-saving technology to keep the display from draining the battery too quickly.
The 32nm Exynos 5 Dual also includes SATA III and USB 3.0, which, when combined with the RAM's 12.8GBps bandwidth, should make for some speedy file manipulation indeed. In fact, that type of firepower should enable 1080p video decoding at 60 fps. Wi-Fi Display technology is also onboard.
Unfortunately, the whitepaper is just that: a list of specs, without a single word spent on product availability. No mobile devices have been officially announced for the Exynos 5 Dual -- not even the aforementioned 2560x1600 11-inch tablet -- and we have no idea when the first Cortex-A15-powered devices will actually hit the streets.
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