Remember the Cortex-A9 we talked about just a few days ago - the one that can clock in at well over 2 GHz on a 28nm process? Turns out Samsung has had its eyes on that bad boy for a while - they've now announced a mobile CPU based on the architecture (one caveat, though - the chip is manufactured on a 45nm process).
The lack of a major die shrink may keep things running at a more reasonable clip (1 GHz), but the improved architecture still allows for huge improvements over today's tech. Namely:
- Dual 1 GHz A9 cores
- 64 KB data and instruction cache
- 1 MB L2 cache
- HDMI 1.3a
- Full 1080P video encode/decode at 30 fps
- Triple display controller
- Up to 5x the 3D graphics performance over previous Samsung processors
Further, it looks like we're looking at a fairly flexible chip here:
For design flexibility and system BOM cost reduction, Orion integrates a set of interfaces commonly used in mobile devices to configure various peripheral functionalities.
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