Samsung provided some information about Exynos, the company's first quad-core mobile application processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Franscisco. The Exynos chip is a 32nm High-k Metal Gate application processor with GHz multi-core CPU. It will come in versions using two or four ARM Cortex A9 cores running at rates from 200 MHz to 1.5 GHz along with a 64-bit ARM Neon media processing block. The cores share a 1 Mbyte L2 cache. Samsung's latest version of graphics unit includes four pixel processors and one geometry engine with a dedicated 128 KByte L2 cache. The graphics support the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and can generate up to 57 Mpolygons/s. Samsung claims that the new chip delivers up to 26.3 percent improvements in video frame rates.

The chip supports two LPDDR2 or DDR3 interfaces running up to 400 MHz for a total memory bandwidth of up to 6.4 Gbytes/s.

According to the company, the chip can deliver up to 26 percent more performance overall than Samsung's current Exynos chip made in a 45 nm process. It also can deliver improvements in battery life ranging from 34 to 50 percent, depending on the application.

Samsung is expectd to formally announce the new chip at next week's Mobile World Congress.