ARM's Cortex A15 and Mali-T604 have gone under the microscope at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco
The silicon which sits at the heart of Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 – if you’re lucky enough to reside in supported locations – has gone on display at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and the Cortex A15 CPU and fourth-gen Mali-T604 GPU have reportedly wowed the crowds, running ARM’s graphically intense buggy game, Timbuktu, at up to 60 frames per second.
The chaps over at PC Mag visited the conference and noted that the latest iteration from the British chip designer still appears to be at the cutting edge of the market, despite strong offerings from San Diego-based Qualcomm and gaming giant NVIDIA.
ARM execs reportedly showed off the company’s wares on a variety of different platforms, but the Exynos 5 Dual-toting Google Nexus 10 and similarly powerful Samsung Chromebook apparently stood-out, running a 24-bit display of 2560 x 1600 at an impressive 60FPS.
The Exynos 5 Dual chipset integrates two ARM Cortex A15 cores clocked to 1.7GHz and the dual-core setup is capable of matching Qualcomm’s excellent S4 Krait CPU, which has been burning up benchmarking sites all over the world since its introduction back in 2011.
The company’s Mali-T604 is also widely regarded as one the most powerful GPU’s on the market and the chip, which makes use of ARM’s unified shader architecture, is going from strength to strength, with every revision, though Samsung opted to use a more efficient PowerVR GPU in its Exynos 5 Octa chipset.
The Exynos 5 Octa does makes use of ARM’s A15 CPU design though, and to great effect. The chipset utilizes ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, which places large, power-hungry processor cores next to low-power ones to deliver a more consistent multi-core experience that uses significantly less power than previous offerings without skimping on power, which in the case of the Exynos 5 Octa is an A15 sitting next to the more demure A7.
Needless to say Qualcomm's next update to its S4 range – the Snapdragon 800 – will up the ante when it launches, as will NVIDIA's upcoming Kepler, but for the time being the best is still very much British.
