Samsung Galaxy Note 2 - Hardware disappointment




I watched the Samsung Unpacked 2012 keynote and was a little underwhelmed. The magician's card tricks amazed me but the Note 2 didn't. I was underwhelmed that Samsung chose to put their Exynos 4412 which is already present in the Galaxy S3 mobile just with a higher CPU clock speed (1.6GHz).

Hey WHAT? How can you say that? The  Exynos 4412  in the S3 is creaming the competition right now??? Well the Exynos 4412 SOC includes a rather old and overclocked Mali 400MP GPU. It's already 2 generations behind ARM's latest and greatest being the 2nd generation Mali 6xx series. These top of the line GPU's are several fold faster in all aspects of graphical processing plus adding additions like GLES 3.0, DirectX 11a and so on so forth.


Samsung had previously announced their Exynos 5250 and in the process (no pun intended) got our hopes up. The 52xx Exynos series promises a processor based of ARM's latest SOC architecture being A15. This design is said to bring performance and power benefits and as a result of this better thermal efficiency. In other words a far superior processor to the 44XX series as you'd expect with such a big model number bump. Not forgetting the 52XX also includes the first generation Mali 604T GPU, not quite the best but a hell of a lot better than the Mali 400MP.

I have to bring Qualcomm into this, they have their latest Snapdragon APQ8064 PRO processor (ARM A15 architecture) fabricated at 28nm vs Samsungs Exynos 32nm offerings. It comes with their long awaited Adreno 320 GPU which currently bests any other GPU out there. Qualcomm initially underwhelmed us all earlier this year by releasing their APQ8064 non-PRO version which came with a slower Adreno 225 GPU. Their PRO version of the SOC is in the Xiaomi Mi-2 and LG's next flagship phone. With Xiaomi's dream hardware and LG's in-cell IPS display the APQ8064 makes these devices appear a generation ahead of Samsung and it's vibrant blue-tinted white AMOLED based screens.



So why the underwhelming move Samsung? Other chip makers are keeping with the times? The Note is supposed to be magical? At least according to their keynote it is. I honestly feel Samsung is suppressing the development of technology by holding back their better SOC's. I think Samsung know's where they can put their spare S-Pen since I will DEFINITELY not be getting one of these devices.

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