Samsung Orion will be one of NVIDIA’s toughest competitiors for smartphones. Semiconductor giant Samsung revealed details on the new Cortex A9 processor that not only promises good CPU performance, but even better graphics with a not yet named graphics processor.
Samsung developed its own circuit design for ARM’s Cortex A8 architecture and the Hummingbird SoC was given a powerful graphics processor, beating most of the competition, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. With the Cortex A9 generation of processor circuits Samsung looks to raise the bar to almost insurmountable levels.
Samsung says that it has improved graphics performance five times over with Orion, comparing to the already market leading Hummingbird. With the same CPU architecture as Tegra 2 it looks like Samsung is trying to beat NVIDIA at the home ground; graphics.
Samsung Orion will be made with 45 nanometer technology and each Cortex A9 core operates at 1.0 GHz. With 64KB L1 cache each and a shared L2 cache of 1MB for some more breating space. The circuit will have a more powerful memory controller and faster data buses to support playback of 1080p video and demanding 3D graphics.
Using an enhanced graphics processing unit (GPU), the new processors are capable of delivering 5 times the 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung.
The 3D focus is what makes us tingle the most, but Samsung revealed no details on the graphics processor in Orion. If it will offer performance as good as promised we might see a revolutionin mobile gaming. Already with current, fairly limited, graphics processors we can see some impressive 3D effects in our smartphones.
Samsung’s Orion circuit supports up to three displays and can connect to a variety of storage media or for that matter energy efficient LPDDR2 or DDR3 memories.
Samsung Orion will start shipping to selected partners in Q4, but mass production is not set to start until Q1 2011. NVIDIA will get a small headstart with the first Tegra 2 devices in stores this year alrady, but we’re not sure if it’s enough.
