Korean tech giant Samsung has unveiled the newest edition to its Exynos range of mobile processors in the Exynos 5420.

According to the company, this ARM-based SoC (system-on-a-chip) is the first to make use of the six-core Mali-T628 GPU to deliver an enhanced graphics performance.

New SoC boast improved GPU muscles

Samsung stated that the Exynos 5420 will up the graphics processing capabilities of the previous generation Exynos 5 Octa by more than two times, thanks to the prowess of the ARM Mali-T628 MP6 cores.

The company added that the Exynos 5420 is able to perform general-purpose computing on its GPU, accelerating complex and computationally intensive algorithms or operations that are traditionally the sole domain of the SoC’s CPU.

In addition, the new Exynos 5 Octa also supports OpenGL ES 3.0 as well as Full Profile Open CL 1.1, delivering a processing power boost required for multi-layer rendering of high-end, complex gaming, video post-processing, and general high-function multi-tasking operations.

CPU prowess of the Octa also improved

Beyond the new graphical capabilities, the Exynos 5420 is powered by four ARM Cortex-A15 processors running at 1.8 GHz per core as well as four Cortex-A7 cores each running at 1.3 GHz.

This should help deliver a marked processing performance improvement over the current Exynos 5 Octa (5410), which utilises four Cortex-A15 cores clocked at 1.6 GHz each and four Cortex-A7 cores running at 1.2 GHz each. According to Samsung, CPU processing performance of the new 5420 has been improved by 20% over its predecessor by optimising the power-saving design.

Samsung said that the Exynos 5420 is currently being sampled to customers and is scheduled to go into mass-production during August. We suspect that the first mobile device to sport the new Exynos 5420 will be the upcoming Galaxy Note III.

To the point

Samsung unveiled its first-gen Exynos 5 Octa mobile processor back in March and proceeded to introduce this eight-core CPU in the international version of the Galaxy S4 (review).

During benchmarking tests we found that the Exynos 5 Octa did have a slight edge over the Snapdragon 600 used in the HTC One (review), with the Snapdragon biting back within graphically intensive benchmarks.

The new version looks to be capable of remedying that chink in the armour of the Exynos 5 Octa, making it more capable of taking on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 range topper and Nvidia’s Tegra 4.  

“Demand for richer graphic experiences is growing rapidly nowadays,” said Taehoon Kim, VP of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. “In order to meet that demand from both OEMs and end users, we developed this processor which enables superb graphical performance without compromising power consumption.”

In other mobile related news, HTC recently revealed a more compact version of its One smartphone (review) in the One mini.