Samsung Galaxy Alpha features an Exynos 5430, the world's first 20nm HKMG based chip

Yesterday we saw the Samsung Galaxy Alpha announced, with a premium metal design and an unusually smaller 4.7 inch display. One interesting addition to the handset is the powerful Samsung Exynos 5430 octa-core processor. It just so happens that this chip is the world’s first 20nm high-k metal gate (HKMG) based chip on a smartphone.

This new, more precise 20nm process comes after years of running on chips made using the 28nm lithography. The benefits of this new manufacturing node include the possibility to crank up clock speeds a bit, and achieve a better thermal footprint.

Samsung's 20nm HKMG is a planar design, but the casting process now forms the gate as the last part of the transistor construction rather than the first, and this theoretically improves performance since gate characteristics are less affected by extreme temperatures in manufacturing. When it comes to the new Exynos 5430 system-on-a-chip, we do know that it is a big.LITTLE design using four Cortex A15 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, and four Cortex A7 cores running at up to 1.3GHz.

We cant wait to see how the Exynos 5430 performs in the real world with the Galaxy Alpha.

source - AnandTech