Samsung Exynos 5430 Is The Company's First 20nm SoC
Samsung has introduced the new Exynos 5430 SoC, tghe company's first system-on-chip manufactured using the 20nm process. Besides the most advanced manufacturing, the new 5430 is not much different than the Exynos 5420 or 5422 SoCs. Its CPU frequency has slightly changed to 1.8GHz for the A15 cores and 1.3GHz for the A7 cores.
A bigger change is that the CPU IP has been updated from the r2p4 found in previous 542X incarnations to a r3p3 core revision. This change should provide better clock gating and power characteristics for the CPU side of the SoC.
On the GPU side, the 5430 offers a little boost to 600MHz clock frequency for the Mali T628MP6.
The Exynos 5430 also offers a new HEVC (H.265) hardware decoder block, bringing its decoding capabilities in par with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805.
Also added is a new Cortex A5 co-processor dedicated to audio decoding. This one is responsible for decoding, sampling rate conversion and band equalization. It also provides the chip with voice capabilities such as voice recognition and voice triggered device wakeup without external DSPs.
The memory subsystem remains the same, maintaining the 2x32-bit LPDDR3 interface, able to sustain frequencies up to 2133MHz or 17GB/s.
The first device shipping with this SoC will be the Galaxy Alpha beginning early September.