Samsung's new Exynos 4 Quad
Prior to the official announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S III on May 3 in London, Samsung has released details on the processor and chipset which will be powering the new Samsung flagship phone.
Samsung's new Exynos 4 Quad has four Cortex A9 cores clocked at 1.4GHz. Samsung claims to have 20-percent lower power consumption than last years dual core Exynos system due to a die shrink from the 45 nm process to 32 nm, quad-core efficiency and the ability to power down cores and adjust the voltage of each core depending on the the current workload of the device.
In contrast, the Exynos 4's competition, the Nvidia Tegra 3 uses a quad core processor with a fifth low speed (500 MHz) companion core. For non-intensive tasks the Tegra 3 uses just the fifth core. The Tegra 3 is built on older 40 nm technology, though most ARM processors now are still built on the 45 nm process.
No word on what graphics processing unit (GPU) is being paired with the Exynos 4 is, but Samsung has a video showing the new chipset powering a 2560 x 1600 display, which indicates that the new Exynos 4 will have a powerful GPU.
There is also no confirmation on whether or not the Exynos 4 will have a LTE chip embedded into it. We should find out the answer to these remaining questions when Samsung unveils the Galaxy S III next week.