Samsung announced its new Orion processor a few months ago and despite touting its graphical capabilities, the company was cagey over what would be pushing the pixels. However, the electronics-giant had the chip on display at the ARM Technology Conference this week, and those on-hand managed to find out a little more about what made this next-gen chip tick.
Unfortunately, the dual-core SoC won't be powered by ARM's upcoming Mali T-604 GPU. Instead, it'll be using a four-shader version of the older Mali T-400, which should still pack quite a punch. Once again the manufacturer was flaunting its 1080p video playback and a five times improvement in graphics performance over the previous generation. To demonstrate the performance, the platform was shown running the Futuremark Samurai benchmark without a hitch.
The dual-core Cortex A9-based Orion is expected to power the company's next-gen tablets and smartphones. Clocked at 1GHz or higher, the SoC will deliver some impressive performance that will allow it to compete with the best from the likes of TI, Qualcomm and NVIDIA.
The use of a Mali GPU is also a bit of an upset. The current-generation Hummingbird SoC - which powers the Galaxy S family of smartphones and the Galaxy Tab, among other devices - uses a GPU from ARM-competitor Imagination's PowerVR series. There were some rumours that the Orion would be powered by a next-generation PowerVR graphics-core, but the fact that it uses a Mali chip should be a major victory for ARM's fledgling graphics-division.
It's not clear when the Orion will arrive at this point, and in spite of suggestions that it could show up in products later this year, the official line is still that it won't enter mass production until the first half of 2011. If this is true, it might make the SoC a prime candidate for the second-generation Galaxy Tab.
