Samsung Exynos 5250 - production starting in Q2 2012

Being a new generation of Mali architecture and being clocked modestly higher than the previous generation's 440 MHz implementation should privilege it enough to impress against the competition of late 2012.

 

It should be and not only because of increase fragment shader performance but also a quite high difference in geometry performance. If you'd count the VS lanes in a Mali400 as SPs you'll probably end up at 4, while on anything T6xx (all of them having USC ALUs) it's more like 64 and beyond.

 

Pack it in...your getting me excited!

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6148/samsung-announces-a15malit604-based-exynos-5-dual

I didn't know the T604 is just DX9.0L3. How sure is it that Anand isn't wrong in that regard?

I thought it was established from the day T604 was announced a long time ago that it'll have USC ALUs.

 

I guess we can trust ARM official page for that: OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, DirectX 11 and OpenCL 1.1.

Interestingly Samsung Exynos 5 Web pages and PDF don't say anything about DirectX.

 

To quote Anand he states:

I browsed through the different T6xx variants and while for T604 ARM stops at OGL_ES2.0, T624 f.e. is also listing OGL_ES3.0. I couldn't imagine that the 604 isn't OGL_ES3.0 or just DX9L3 (DX11 certified DX9), so it's more a call for ARM's marketing department to set the record straight.

***edit: on another note 5250 for Q4 12 or Q1 13? It seems that 28nm irrelevant of process variant and/or foundry are quite a headache for everyone.

 

I really don't think we will be seeing a mobile gpu with full dx 11 support..including tesselation..this year..very doubtfull.

Anands reasoning (or another site?) that geometry processing would vastly increase die size and power consumption let alone never be used seems quite reasonable..after all windows 8 rt is 9.3 minimum...the dx11 bit must be efficiency improvements.

 

It's 32nm.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6148/samsung-announces-a15malit604-based-exynos-5-dual

 

Are there SW incompatibilities between Samsung HW because of the use of different GPU and CPU cores, sometimes within the same product lines?

There are criticisms about fragmentation among Android HW in general but Samsung seems to source different SOCs all the time.

 

It's the same with HTC..it's only because of lte with Qualcomm having the ip.

 

Just in case anyone missed my question, any help on this? Thanks in advance.

 

That particular chip supports external cellular connectivity, so LTE isn't integrated in to the SoC.

 

Thanks. So I guess my question is why wouldn't Samsung have integrated LTE for the power saving benefits like on Krait? Please bear with me, I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as you guys on this stuff.

 

Perhaps because they don't have their own LTE IP?

 

Samsung does make discrete LTE modems. Albeit not true multi-mode like the qcom ones.

Modem integration can cause quite a few hassles. Not the least of which is qualification and validation on top of heavier IP protection that requires encryption ROMs and thus, difficulty with chip bringup.

It adds significantly to the time-to-market of an SoC.

 

My bad. And here I thought that all A15 SoCs are going to arrive under 28nm at least.

 

It seems from what can be seen as Exynos5 activity on the ChromiumOS gerrit that we'll be seeing a ChromeOS laptop using the chip; https://gerrit.chromium.org/gerrit/#/q/status:open+project:chromiumos/third_party/kernel,n,z
So my previous declaration of it being one of the next Nexus devices seems to be wrong, replaced by something weirder.

Samsung's own sources still point out to a device using the chip, but without any device configuration file it's just a guess what it actually is from all the devices defined in the machine file. My guess is that is still a tablet.

 

My guess is we are unlikely to see this chip before MWC. It will likely premiere in the next Galaxy smartphone and tablet for 2013.

 

Seems Nebudchadnezzar was right:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/18/google-11-6-inch-arm-based-samsung-chromebook-hands-on/

One heck of a deal IMHO. I'll see if I can lay my hands on one mostly for the 2nd thoughts I'm having for the Chrome OS. Other than that it looks like a very solid offer especially for that price.

 

The price certainly looks great. I hope one can remove Chrome OS and put some Linux on it Anway battery life looks too low to me.