The real star of the Samsung Galaxy Alpha handset is not its slighty metallic case, but rather the CPU inside. Little attention has been given to this new chip in the press releases and now let’s find out why it’s actually a big deal. We’re dealing with the Samsung Exynos 5430, the first Samsung chipset with a 20 nm production process.
This is the next step following the 28 nm process and what this means is that the new generation of chips uses up less power than the previous one (25% less). The Exynos 5430 is pretty strong, in spite of using less power and aside from the Nvidia Tegra K1, there’s no challenger in benchmarks. The power comes from four Cortex A15 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz and 4 Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.3 GHz.
The big.LITTLE architecture is present with Heterogenous Multi Processing and all. This Exynos chip offers support for 2K displays, a HDMI interface, H.265/HEVC decoding and 17 GB/s memory bandwidth. Samsung Galaxy Note 4 may also adopt this CPU, or a slightly upgraded version of it, plus we may also get to see it on future Samsung tablets.
