You probably have seen this coming, but Samsung has provided an early peek at its quad-core Exynos SoC (processor) during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The quad-core Exynos is codenamed 4412 (1.5GHz) and dual-core version is Exynos 5250 (weird numbering scheme, right?). Internally, the Exynos features four ARM Cortex A9 cores and a number of co-processors. Beyond the raw muscles, the chips are manufactured using a smaller silicon process (smaller transistors), at 32nm. As you know, using smaller transistors is beneficial in many ways: it makes the chip less expensive to produce (per transistor) and it often offers the opportunity to improve the battery life. Some have tried to speculate on how much savings that would translate to, but beyond the silicon process, one would need to understand the overall chip architecture to forecast accurate power consumption.Pretty much everyone expects the Samsung Exynos 4412 to be used in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S3 phone, but so far, there are no real indicators that it is the case, although it would totally make sense. LG has just released its LG Optimus 4X based on Tegra 3, and HTC is almost certainly going to announce a Tegra 3 handset as well. The previous Exynos processor that was used in the Galaxy S2 was performing very well, so the level of expectations is high. It will be interesting to see if NVIDIA gains a definite advantage by using its 5th companion core, recently named 4-PLUS-1 technology.