Next 'Galaxy S' Phone To Use Samsung's Quad-Core Processor

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co said on Thursday it would mass-produce its faster, energy-saving quad-core mobile microprocessor to power the third generation of its flagship Galaxy S smartphone, due to be unveiled next week.

Samsung said it is sampling the chips to major handset makers as it seeks to expand its customer base from Apple Inc to its handset rivals such as Nokia , HTC and Motorola.

The South Korean firm is the world's top manufacturer of mobile application processors (AP), enjoying booming sales of Apple's iPhone and iPad as well as its own Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets.

The Exynos 4 Quad, based on British chip designer ARM Holdings' Cortex A9 technology, enables more tasks in a shorter period of time, for example, a task such as streaming video can run on one core while the other cores update applications in the background, connecting to the web and scanning virus-check simultaneously.

Samsung plans to unveil its upgraded Galaxy S III smartphone next week in London, banking on a heavy marketing campaign heading into the summer Olympics in the city.

(Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Eric Meijer)

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Comments

[Max Sevilla]

06:35 AM on 04/27/2012

Sadly what the article fails to mention is the US versions of the new Galaxy S3s will contain the Snapdragon S4 SoC. Not Exynos quad core.

[stormbringer56]

07:56 PM on 04/26/2012

I have the GS2 and i love the phone ...just waiting for some ICS

[RodbfromNC]

03:53 PM on 04/26/2012

I actually want one of them.

[Bioxoxide]

05:35 PM on 04/26/2012

Sadly what the article fails to mention is the US versions of the new Galaxy S3s will contain the Snapdragon S4 SoC. Not Exynos quad core.

[nobodyzhome]

06:18 PM on 04/26/2012

I thought that was only for LTE versions... But yeah, now that I write that, who would offer an HSPA+ version?

[bigfoot00]

02:06 PM on 04/26/2012

Samsung is great! 삼성 만세!

[jsarets]

02:02 PM on 04/26/2012

Wrong direction. GL performance is more critical than ARM performance.

The most significant change in Android ICS is that Google dramatically overhauled the graphics libraries to run mostly on the GL cores rather than on the ARM cores. This is a big part of the reason why its was such a difficult update for device vendors using different graphics processors (ICS launched the Galaxy Nexus with a single-core PowerVR SGX540).

Android ICS has difficulty loading more than two cores concurrently. Past versions had more runnable threads because of the software rendering, but now those are offloaded to GL. Now it's mostly just application logic, which tends to be single-threaded, running on the ARM cores.

This is why the dual-core Snapdragon S4 performs better than the quad-core Tegra 3 running Android ICS. The two Krait cores in the Snapdragon S4 can each dispatch three instructions per clock and share a dual-channel memory controller, whereas the four Cortex A9 cores in the Tegra 3 can only dispatch two instructions per clock and share a single-channel memory controller.

The S4 has better performance per thread, which is more important than thread-level parallelism. The Tegra 3 has a severe bottleneck at its memory bus. All those cores are starving for memory bandwidth, so they basically waste power waiting for loads and stores to main memory. The funny thing is that NVIDIA should know better, because modern high-end graphics cards would be impossible without exotic memory bus architectures like GDDR5.

We need wider ARM cores with a wider memory bus, not more ARM cores. GL performance scales very well with core count (assuming sufficient memory bandwidth), but ARM performance doesn't.

[Highball]

01:32 PM on 04/26/2012

Man, say what you want about Samsung's phones, but they always get seriously hot models.

[Makos62]

12:49 PM on 04/26/2012

I still like a phone that fits in my pocket..

[ingua2]

12:55 PM on 04/26/2012

yeah dated small iphones fit perfectly into skinny jeans and emo hair.

[Makos62]

01:01 PM on 04/26/2012

Emo hair? Skinny jeans? This is tech, not the Style section.

[nobodyzhome]

06:19 PM on 04/26/2012

Is it possible you're spamming?

[RattleCat]

10:24 AM on 04/26/2012

There was an interesting article about quad core phones a few weeks ago.  No so much for the inevitable dominance of them in coming years, but for the comments from various companies like Qualcomm (our dual core will beat_any quad core), Nvidia (our quad core is better than your quad core), and Microsoft (dual core and quad core are bad because we don't have any).

A full link sends a comment to pending, but go to cnet and search "7 myths quad-core phones".

[Mauryan]

10:15 AM on 04/26/2012

Looks like Samsung has no idea what it is doing. It is churning out phones in every size and range just so that one of them will click, but does not know which one. One cannot even keep up with the models it is coming out with. Over production can lead to mind saturation and Samsung might shoot itself in the foot in the bargain. Apple makes one model and Samsung has to make several to keep up with it. The next Samsung phone might come with a mouse, keyboard, printer, projector, shredder and a couple of ping pong balls to go with it. These guys seem to have no clue whatsoever regarding being creative. They seem to make up for it by mass producing and flooding the market with all variations they can think of.

[etiennemacchias]

10:31 AM on 04/26/2012

That's called competition. Different companies cater to different target markets.

[DefineReality]

11:38 AM on 04/26/2012

If someone wants to live in a sterile world where they don't have options, they can always go to Apple.

There are a lot of nice things about the iPhone and a lot of crap about it but with them, I just have to deal with the crap. If I go to Android, I have options and I can find the phone that fits me best.

From what it seems like you apparently haven't looked at the latest iPhone either. You're going on about how the next Samsung will have this, or that, or this and blah blah blah.. The last version of the iPhone bumped up to a dual core and beefed it's specs up to try and keep up with the latest Androids that had already been out on the market. iOS 5 started dumping software features that Android has had for years on it already (dictation button on keyboard and the notification bar were both copied from Android).

My bet is, what ever you see Android has now is what will be on the next version of the iPhone. Because that is what Apple does, they take something existing already and tweak it. They have never been, nor will they ever be actual innovators.

[Mauryan]

02:21 PM on 04/26/2012

Like it or not. All the technology - touch screen, software, mobile phones etc have been there. No one claims Apple invented any of it. But Apple was the first company to put them together in a nice package. It set up the next level of standard for smart phones. Samsung did none of that. Now they package their phones copying what Apple put together into various sizes and shapes and try to make a mockery of Apple products. I am no Apple fanboi. But I do give credite where it is due. Apple set up the App market and opened another door to a very different business world. Do give some credit to Apple where it is due. It might be a monolithic, secretive and tightly controlled company. But they do open new avenues that none of the others have been able to copy. I have respect for Google too for its own creative approach towards many things. It is easy to make products based on a platform someone else sets up, mass produce and flood the market. That is not what I admire much. That is cheap, easy, no risk approach to business. To me that is third rate business model. Apple from the standpoint of creativity, stands tall whether you like it or not. Its latest Iphone 4S sales simply vouches for it.

[J0E1]

10:00 AM on 04/26/2012

Everyone knows Samsung phones aren't nearly as good as Phones with Samsung parts and an Apple stamped on the back.

[RattleCat]

10:07 AM on 04/26/2012

I must say, I'm always amused by people who always complain about all the Apple references here, especially when they are the first to even mention the company.

[theveggiedude]

12:54 PM on 04/26/2012

That's because the Samsung phones depend on emulation to run apps. It's little wonder they NEED quad core to make up for poor performance.

[derickma]

03:34 PM on 04/26/2012

so your saying the iphone 5 won't need or have a quad core.?

[nobodyzhome]

06:24 PM on 04/26/2012

Um... what are they emulating?

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

[Stefano Seebing]

09:53 AM on 04/26/2012

Meanwhile the Lumia 900 runs oh so smooth on a single-core.

[ingua2]

12:57 PM on 04/26/2012

because it only has about 5 apps in the library. It doesn't take much power to run a calculator or angry birds. Poor fella.

[Lechiffre]

03:47 PM on 04/26/2012

Stefano Bissu Schweitzer oder wie !

[Wise-guy]

09:50 AM on 04/26/2012

Man, it is hard to keep up with technology...

[Lechiffre]

03:47 PM on 04/26/2012

Keep up with the Kardarshions then !

[Wise-guy]

10:04 AM on 04/27/2012

I don't like Kardarshions...
Anything you purchase today will get outdated...It is extremely hard to be up-to-date with technologies these days.

[Drama Llama]

09:30 AM on 04/26/2012

I love improvements... but why the heck does a phone need a quad core processor? Or even a dual core?

Reminds me of Intel battling AMD in the 90's... Always trumping each other with bigger processors with more Ghz.... I am not even sure if it made our computers that much faster or just provided a way for developers to make programs that much more bloated to suck up the processing power.

[J0E1]

10:02 AM on 04/26/2012

Battery life is the main improvement.  Not sure about Samsungs Quad-core but the quad-core Tegra 3 chip has a fifth low power core that runs all the background applications without taxing the main processor.  It's found to be about 30% more efficient.  This is the way phones are going to have to go because battery technology simply can't keep up with bigger and faster phones.

[Drama Llama]

10:44 AM on 04/26/2012

Yeah You are correct.. Same thing happened with PC's .. Went from faster faster faster till the 3ghz range...then to dual, quad core to avoid the heat and power issues.. If it improves battery life then I am all for it.

[theveggiedude]

12:59 PM on 04/26/2012

Why does a phone need quad-core? Because the apps do not run native. There is an emulation layer, aka a java runtime engine, and this dilutes performance.

Apple's iOS has truly native apps, and thus require less RAM and processing power.

[gbtimmon]

03:29 PM on 04/26/2012

Android doesnt use java. It runs dalvick, which has a register based stack. It coded in the java apis/language, but then compiled to an entirely different language. Register based stack means that the overhead of the virtual machine is next to non-existent, and is as close to native as the iOS system is. In fact, iOS does not run native code, but also has a virtual machine layer , also register based. ( you called it an emulation layer which is a misnomer here). That is why iOS is not cross compatable with OSx. Android has a linux based kernal and has a smaller foot print then the apple iOS. It also has better Memory mangement. I.e. android uses less Ram in the kernal, but has a larger api set, meaning it does use more ram. That being said being native or virtual, should have no effect on ram outside of the overhead of loading the virtual machine engine.

After all that, this all says very little about the relative performance of one OS over the other. A Quad core would give no performance increase in single threaded java applications over a single core of the same speed. It would allow the scheduler to spend less time blocking on the processor in ansychronous IO functions to which these platforms are prone and would increase responiveness, but this would be true on both platforms.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Stop acting like you do.

[Samuel Bun]

09:11 AM on 04/26/2012

Amazing to me that heat is not an issue. Quad core seems like over kill, but I have always guessed wrong about the potential of a CPU, I liked the 486 chip and thought that was the peak of computer technology. Do people watch that much video on their phones?

[Bioxoxide]

12:35 PM on 04/26/2012

As processors continue to get smaller, they will produce less heat. The advantage of more than one core is the ability of each of the cores to handle different processes. One can handle video, one handles background operations, one handles data connection etc.

[ingua2]

12:59 PM on 04/26/2012

that is provided the OS fully uses multicore. Currently Android does a better job than iOS. As for multitasking, it's virtually non-existent on Apple devices. I mean real multitasking.

[Highball]

01:30 PM on 04/26/2012

I watch video on my iPhone a lot. I might watch a TV episode, or someone might send me a link to a YouTube video. Whatever.