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Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 8-core mobile processor revealed

Samsung has revealed its latest mobile processor chip, the Exynos 5 Octa, at CES 2013.

The Korean tech giant used its second keynote address of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to show off this new version of the Exynos 5 chip.

It’s a considerable step up from the Exynos 5 Dual found powering the Google Nexus 10 tablet.

Check out the currently confirmed specs.

Exynos 5 Octa Specs
The Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core (hence the name) processor based on the ARM Cortex-A15 architecture.

However, the Exynos 5 Octa also makes use of ARM’s big.LITTLE technology, which means the processing load can dynamically switch to the far more power-efficient Cortex-A7 standard for general tasks or less demanding applications.

Indeed, those eight cores are split evenly between the high-performance A15 and the power-efficient A7 standards, which work in tandem to create the perfect balance of power and power efficiency. That’s the idea, anyway.

Samsung claims that power consumption is cut by as much as 70 per cent compared to the Exynos 5 Dual chip. This should make it far more suitable for compact smartphones with their smaller batteries.

Thanks to the presence of those four Cortex-A15 cores, though, the Exynos 5 Octa will also outperform the Exynos 5 Dual for processing grunt, and will provide twice the 3D performance of anything currently on the market (though presumably not the forthcoming Tegra 4 and Snapdragon 800).

Exynos 5 Octa Launch and Availability
There’s no specific news on when the Exynos 5 Octa will start appearing in devices, but we’d put money on the Samsung Galaxy S4 being the first to get a taste when it’s launched some time around the middle of this year.

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