At CES, Samsung announced its Exynos 5 Octa SoC featuring four ARM Cortex A7s and four ARM Cortex A15s. Unusually absent from the announcement was any mention of the Exynos 5 Octa's GPU configuration. Given that the Exynos 5 Dual featured an ARM Mali-T604 GPU, we only assumed that the 4/8-core version would do the same. Based on multiple sources, we're now fairly confident in reporting that the with the Exynos 5 Octa Samsung included a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU running at up to 533MHz.

The PowerVR SGX 544 is a lot like the 543 used in Apple's A5/A5X, however with the addition of DirectX 10 class texturing hardware and 2x faster triangle setup. There are no changes to the unified shader ALU count. Taking into account the very aggressive max GPU frequency, peak graphics performance of the Exynos 5 Octa should be between Apple's A5X and the A6X (assuming Samsung's memory interface is just as efficient as Apple's):

Mobile SoC GPU Comparison
  PowerVR SGX 543MP2 PowerVR SGX 543MP4 PowerVR SGX 544MP3 PowerVR SGX 554MP4
Used In A5 A5X Exynos 5 Octa A6X
SIMD Name USSE2 USSE2 USSE2 USSE2
# of SIMDs 8 16 12 32
MADs per SIMD 4 4 4 4
Total MADs 32 64 48 128
GFLOPS @ Shipping Frequency 16.0 GFLOPS 32.0 GFLOPS 51.1 GFLOPS 71.6 GFLOPS

It's good to see continued focus on GPU performance by the major SoC vendors, although I'd like to see a device ship with something faster than Apple's highest end iPad. At the show we heard that we might see this happen in the form of an announcement in 2013, with a shipping device in 2014.

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  • jeffkibuule - Sunday, January 13, 2013 - link

    What are the chances we'll see Exynos SoCs in non-Samsung devices? Still 0%?
  • liem107 - Sunday, January 13, 2013 - link

    Exynos socs can be found on some lenovo phones and some chinese phones like meizu.
  • larsivi - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    The Cotton Candy by FXI also use Exynos.
  • dishayu - Wednesday, January 16, 2013 - link

    Indian "iBerry" tablets as well.
  • edlee - Sunday, January 13, 2013 - link

    thats great, now the gs4 will get all the game optimizations thats the apple games get.

    as well as the fact that powervr 544MP3 is faster that mali t604, but mayber not as quick as T658 that samsung could not get ready in time.
  • alex3run - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    Powervr is a third slower than mali t604, so it's strange that samsung has chosen a weaker GPU for its flagship SoC. That's why I think the rumor is fake.
  • djgandy - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    Show your workings....
  • edlee - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    maybe an 8 core mali t604 might be faster than a 4 core 543/544 series.

    Buts its more efficient to have a four core 543/544, at least till mali T658 goes mainstream.
  • alex3run - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    4 core Mali t604@ 533MHz = 68.2 GFLOPS, that's higher than can deliver PowerVR 544MP3 (51.1 GFLOPS).
  • Death666Angel - Monday, January 14, 2013 - link

    But it is usually getting outperformed in the offscreen tests vs the iPhone5 with a 543MP3 *link to Anandtech Nexus 10 performance figures* Am I missing something?

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