Samsung Exynos 4412 Quad vs Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 vs Apple A5

Samsung Exynos 4412 Quad

The Samsung Exynos 4 Quad (also called Exynos 4412, introduced in 2012) is an ARM SoC for tablets and smartphones. It includes a quad-core processor based on the Cortex-A9 architecture (including NEON SIMD extension), which clocks with 1.4 to 1.6 GHz (depending on the model). Thus, the computing power is similar to competitors like Nvidia's Tegra 3 SoC. The memory controller supports LPDDR2, DDR2 and DDR3 with a maximum of two 32-bit channels and 400 MHz clock speed, resulting in a bandwidth of up to 6.4 GB/s.

The SoC integrates an ARM Mali-400 MP4 GPU (15.8 GFLOPS at 440 MHz). Typical smartphone games (2012) will run fluently even in high resolutions like 1280 x 720 pixels. Videos can be accelerated by a multi-format video decoder (1080p AVI, WMV, H.264, H.263, VC1, MPEG2, MPEG4).

The chip is produced in Samsung fabs in 32nm HKMG and mainly found in high-end devices like the Samsung Galaxy S3 or Note 2. Depending on the clock speed, the power consumption should be between 2 and 4 W (estimated).

Texas Instruments OMAP 4430

The Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP 4430 is a SoC with two ARM Cortex-A9 cores including NEON SIMD engine, two Cortex M3 cores (to save power), a PowerVR SGX540 graphics card (304-365 MHz) and a dual channel LPDDR2 memory controller (max 400 MHz).

Apple A5

The Apple A5 is a dual-core processor that contains two Cortex A9 cores. Each core is max. clocked at 900 MHz. Furthermore, the A5 integrates a relative fast PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics card and 512MB ram (in the same package for the iPad 2). Apple states a maximum of 2x the performance compared to the previous single core Apple A4.