The Korean handset giants continue to ramp up their belated assault on the high end of the mobile market, with LG releasing some details of its promised top end handset, which will feature the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and Samsung hovering with the GalaxyTab, much fancied as the major challenger to the iPad.
However, the big news from Samsung this week comes from its chip arm, though increasingly its handset business is sourcing many of its components from its previously arms-length stablemate. So the new dual-core apps processor, called Orion, and Samsung's new, faster Flash memory chips for phones, are likely to show up first in the Korean leader's devices.
Orion, the successor to Hummingbird, may give clues to the next iPhone app processor too, since Apple's A4 was co-developed with (and manufactured by) Samsung and is very similar to Hummingbird. Orion uses two 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores and is targeting high-end smartphones, tablets and netbooks.
Like all high-end Samsung chips and mobile devices, advanced multimedia is the key. Made using the 45nm low power process, Orion features a 32Kb data cache and 32Kb instruction cache per core, a 1Mb L2 cache to add speed and a memory interface and bus architecture that are optimized for multimedia applications including HD video playback.
A graphics processing unit allows Orion to deliver five times the 3D graphics performance of Samsung's earlier chips, claims the firm. Although the supplier of the GPU core IPR is not specified, the company has previously used both ARM's Mali and its main rival, Imagination Technologies' PowerVR.
According to EETimes, Samsung is accelerating its app processor roadmap, outlined earlier this year - Orion was originally planned as an 800MHz platform. It will be followed by six further iterations - Pegasus, Hercules, Mercury, Venus and Draco, and culminating with the quad-core Aquila. Orion will be available to a few customers, presumably including Samsung Mobile, in the fourth quarter and in mass production in the first half of 2011.
Meanwhile, Samsung is also pushing the boundaries of smartphone memory. It has shown off new 8Gb and 16Gb moviNAND embedded memory chips for use in high end handsets.
They are the first memory devices that fully support the latest e-MMC (Embedded MultiMediaCard) specs, version 4.1, from the Jedec body. These new specs add performance and efficiency by improving the responsiveness of the e-MMC device to the processor.
Over at LG, the second Korean mobile giant is turning to Nvidia to enhance its own efforts in multimedia handsets. It is to push its Optimus Android range up the value chain during the fourth quarter by using the Tegra 2 mobile processor, which will be the first to sport two 1GHz cores.
Nvidia will get to market ahead of Samsung Orion and dual-core gigahertz projects from Qualcomm, TI and others. The Tegra 2 also features an ultra-low power Nvidia GeForce GPU and its first 1080p HD mobile video processor.
LG said it would introduce “a series of fast, powerful smartphones starting in the fourth quarter of 2010 … with unprecedented power, speed and graphics capability.”
It should double the web browsing speed and boost gaming performance fivefold compared to a single-core 1GHz chip like Samsung Hummingbird or Qualcomm Snapdragon, said an LG executive.
LG also said its Optimus 7 smartphone would support the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard and would be able to share multimedia files with any device compliant with that content sharing scheme.
DLNA is increasingly of interest to mobile operators - Vodafone included it in a recent personal hotspot launch, and it is likely to feature in the planned Verizon/Motorola TV-focused tablet.
LG said Optimus 7 would automatically display capable devices in the same Wi-Fi zone. It is not clear, however, whether this model will also be LG's first Windows Phone 7 offering as many believe.
This article originally appeared in Rethink Wireless
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Samsung and LG make dual-core superphone plans