Samsung and ARM have been working hard on a next-gen collaborative quad-core Exynos processor, and expect to launch it in 2012. John Kalkman, VP LSI, Samsung Electronics recently said during ARM Techcon, “I’m extremely excited to announce that Samsung will deliver a new Exynos processor in 2012 that leverages both the Cortex-A7 and big.Little technology to meet the crucial demands of always-on and always-connected computing.”

The gist of the big.Little tech is that instead of creating a quad-core chip that combines 4 cores of the same size, they are able to mix smaller, slower-speed cores with larger more powerful ones to improve energy use efficiency. In fact, ARM recently indicated that the big.Little technology could bring battery life improvements of as much as 70%. Basically, the chip would be a mix of two high-performance Cortex-A15 cores around 1.8-2.0 GHz and two low-power Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2 GHz, and would be built on a 28nm process technology.

Interestingly, this chip will also likely see a dramatic increase in GPU processing power as well. Furthermore, there is talk that this chip will likely power the next Samsung Galaxy SIII sometime in the middle of next year. You can see the video above where the technology is officially introduced.

Source: Androidandme