An Samsung exec has stated that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3 will use Samsung’s new Exynos 4412 quad-core processor. The quad core CPU will not only improve performance, but will also increase battery life.

But thats not all the Samsung manager had to say. Over the last few years, Samsung has also worked hard on improving its in house telecom chip.  Their newly developped chip will combine long-term evolution (4G-LTE), telecommunications and W-CDMA (=3G) functions. Untill now, Samsung was dependend on the modem manufacturer Qualcomm for providing these chips.

Bye bye Qualcomm

Both Samsung and Qualcomm are working on single chip solutions. These chips, the so called SoC’s (System On Chip) combine communication, CPU and GPU into one chip, saving space and lowering production costs. Untill now, Samsung was depended on Qualcomm for these solutions, but things are changing. According to a Samsung executive (which of course wants to remain anynomous), Samsung is now at a level that they no longer have to depend on third-party manufacturers for their hardware.

 ”Samsung has a stronger intent to lower its dependence on Qualcomm and our technicians believe that we have made significant progress in producing logic-based chips for high-end devices, combined logic and memory chips for graphic controllers and core communication chips for Internet-enabled consumer devices,” said the executive.

“Samsung is paying huge amounts to Qualcomm in return for using its single-chip solutions in strategic digital devices, however, Qualcomm is gradually losing its edge,” said another Samsung executive. Both executives asked not to be identified as they don’t have the right to officially speak to the media.  Source: Koreatimes

That Samsung has made great improvement in this field could be seen on the Mobile World Conference last month, where the Korean based company introduced its new Exynos chip, the Exynos 4412.

Meet the Exynos 4412

The Exynos 4412 is the succesor of the Exynos 4210, which can be found on the Galaxy S2. Here is an overview of Samsung’s current chips:

• Exynos 4210: 45nm – 1.2 GHz – dual core – Cortex A9 – Samsung Galaxy S2
• Exynos 4212: 32nm – 1.2 GHz – dual core – Cortex A9
• Exynos 4412: 32nm – 1.5-1.8 GHz – quad core – Cortex A9 – Samsung Galaxy S3
• Exynos 5250: 32nm – 2.0 GHz – dual core – Cortex A15
• Exynos 5450: 32nm – 2.0 GHz – quad core – Cortex A15

The first number (4) stands for the Cortex architecture, in this case the Cortex A9 (The Cortex A15 is not yet ready for production according to sources in the industry). The second number (4) stands for the number of cores. And the last two numbers stands for the process technology that was used. A 32nm process offers a 26 percent speed boost and battery life improvement of up to 50 percent when compared to an 45nm proces. The difference becomes clear when looking at the following picture:

Exynos 4210 vs Exynos 4212 benchmarked

If the Samsung Galaxy S3 will run on 1.5 or 1.8 GHz (or even higher?) is still unknown, but we can be almost certain that the Samsung Galaxy S3 will feature the Exynos 4212