Samsung decides to go with Exynos 4412 instead of the next-gen 5250 because it is a quad-core [marketing strategy]

Today an interesting rumor reached us from Asia which could cause some uproar or may even raise some eyebrows.

A Samsung employee told the asian newspaper "Asia Today" that Samsung made the decision to go with the old Cortex-A9 core and Exynos 4412 for the next Galaxy S3 smartphone because a quad-core CPU would better sell, even if the next-gen Cortex-A15 based dual-core Exynos 5250 would be as fast as his older quad-core predecessor. Not mention the new features and lower power consumption. 

From a official Samsung announcement dated Nov 30, 2011:

Samsung's new dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 based application software processor, the Exynos 5250, is capable of processing 14 billion instructions per second (DMIPS, Dhrystone million instructions per second) at 2.0GHz, nearly doubling the performance over a current state of the art Cortex-A9-based dual core processor running at 1.5GHz capable of 7,500 DMIPS.

The Exynos 5250 is currently sampling to customers and is scheduled for mass-production in the second quarter of 2012.

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ARM presented us this year at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference the Mali-T604 GPU and the superior GPU was shown together with a quad-core A9 on ARM's roadmap:

In order to make an enhancement and gain performance on Samsung's Galaxy S3 smartpone, they doubled the A9 cores once again and as if this wasn't enough, they also doubled the clock frequency of the good "old" Mali-400 GPU instead of using the next-gen cores for the next Galaxy. 


Is this the way how hardware in smartphones should be enhanced by multiply cores and pumping up the clock rates because of marketing and sales strategy? Because the customer wouldn't noticed an improvement if they stick to dual-core? What about the software? Which application is able to more then 1 core at the same time?
What do you think? Wouldn't be it better, to wait a couple months and enjoy the full featured package, what every nerd and enthusiast was dreaming about?



source: news.nate.com, www.arm.com

Posted in: discussion,Exynos 4412,Galaxy S3,Hardware,Mali-400,Mali-T604