LG presents its own mobile soc

LG has presented its first own mobile soc. The South Korean manufacturer uses the micro-architecture of ARM, has put a PowerVR GPU in the soc and provides the soc with mobile connections with a modem from Intel.

LG has given the soc, which has been known in the rumor circuit under the code name Odin for the past two years, the name Nuclun. The soc is an octacore in big.LITTLE setup; the four better performing processor cores are Cortex A15 cores from ARM with a maximum clock speed of 1.5GHz. With this, LG has clocked the Cortex A15 cores lower than many other manufacturers do, presumably to reduce the power consumption of those processor cores.

The more economical cores are based on the common Cortex A7 microarchitecture that, among other things, MediaTek uses in many socs and Qualcomm uses in its widely used Snapdragon 400 with 4g modem. The Cortex A7 cores run at a maximum of 1.2GHz. It concerns cores on the ARMv7 architecture and therefore not yet on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture.

The GPU is an unnamed variant from the PowerVR series from Imagination, presumably a Rogue. Apple, among others, has also been using PowerVR GPUs in its socs for years. The modem is an X-Gold 726 from Intel, with support for 2g, 3g, 4g and 4g+ up to 300Mbit/s; the South Korean provider where the first device with this soc comes out, offers 4g+ up to 225Mbit/s.

That device is the LG G3 Screen, a variant with the design of the G3, but with a larger screen: instead of a 5.5″ display with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels of the regular G3, this G3 Screen has a 5, 9″ screen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. Features of the G3 such as laser autofocus for the camera and a 1W speaker are also on this device, which will be released this week.

There are few smartphone manufacturers that also design their own mobile socs. In addition to LG, these are Apple, Samsung and Huawei.