A lot of people don’t think of components when Samsung is mentioned, and with tens of millions of phone sales it’s not hard to see why. But the Korean company is one of the large electronics parts suppliers in the world – it’s big part of why they’re so successful. Knowing this, it’s no surprise that they aren’t resting on their laurels and letting Nvidia’s Tegra 3 have all the fun (and press coverage): Samsung is apparently preparing a quad-core processor of their very own.
The new ARM-based system-on-a-chip is reportedly the latest in their very well-received Exynos line, model number 4412. We only know about it because of some short mentions in Samsung’s open source hub. Speeds would top out at 1.5Ghz, the fastest that Samsung’s dual-core phones are running right now, though obviously they’d get a significant performance boost. You’d think that this benchmark-busting beast would certainly be headed for Samsung’s next flagship device, the Galaxy S III, though the last time we saw mention of it it was rocking the slightly older 4212. If Samsung can prepare the quad-core chip in time, it would help it fight back against similar dream machines rumored out of HTC.
2012 would seem to be the year of the quad-core processor, at least as far as high-end Android phones are concerned. It’ll probably take a while for the technology to trickle down into more affordable devices. If you’ve just got to get your hands on some searingly fast hardware, be sure to check out Asus’ Transformer Prime, the first Tegra 3 quad-core tablet, due for an international release in December.[
[via Phandroid]
