new Exynos 5 Dual beats Apple’s A6 chip, Atom Z2460

The new Samsung Chromebook (sold out in hours after being put on sale yesterday) is remarkable not only thanks to its low price of $249, but also due to the processor that powers it – an Exynos 5 Dual.

The Exynos 5 Dual (Exynos 5250) is the world’s first mobile processor built on ARM’s new A15 architecture. For the 5250, Samsung paired a dual-core A15 CPU clocked at 1.7GHz with a Mali T604 GPU, which is another premiere. T604 is based on ARMs Midgard architecture, some of its marquee features being the support for unified shaders, OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1 full profile. In other words, Samsung has combined the best CPU available with the best GPU available, and both are designed by ARM, which provides the advantage of superior integration. For more about Exynos 5 Dual, check out our full overview here.

Now, with all the processing power that Samsung packed into the Exynos 5250, we were dying to see how the new chip performs. Fortunately, Kevin Tofel from GigaOM put the Exynos 5-powered Chromebook through some benchmarks, to see how it fares against the prior model, which runs on an Intel chip. Predictably, the Intel chip performs better, but what’s more important are the scores obtained by the Exynos 5 Dual chip.

Exynos 5 Dual benchmark scores

Tofel ran several benchmark suites on the new ARM Chromebook. Here are the benchmarks and the scores:

  • SunSpider: 668.5ms (lower is better)
  • V8: 3871 (higher is better)
  • Octane: 3465 (higher is better)

Now that we have these scores, let’s compare them to the main competitors of the Exynos 5 Dual chip: the A6 chip in the iPhone 5 and the Atom Z2460 in the Motorola Razr i.

Exynos 5 Dual (Samsung Chromebook)Apple A6 (Apple iPhone 5)Intel Atom Z2460 (Motorola Razr i)Snapdragon S4 (HTC One X)Tegra 3 (HTC One X)
SunSpider668.59081086.616081737.7
V838711533220915071162
Octane34651672204812801131

* The benchmark scores listed above are courtesy of AnandTech.

As you can see, Samsung’s latest chip handily beats the previous leaders, with the difference being especially visible in the SunSpider test. For some perspective, consider that the iPhone 5 is the first device to complete SunSpider in less than 1000ms. At 668.5, the new Exynos just smashes that record.

SunSpider, V8, and Octane  are all JavaScript tests, so results may vary when using other benchmark suites. Still, it’s impressive to see what Samsung was able to achieve, and we are looking forward to see what the Exynos 5 Dual can do in next year’s Samsung Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 3.

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