It appears that the trend of producing in-house processors for smartphones is picking up pace when South Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung decided to develop its own processors and revealed it at the 2013 CES. Samsung named its processor Exynos 5 Octa and it caused a stir at the global event. Now according to the latest updates another OEM from Korea is allegedly gearing up to introduce its first home-grown processor. LG has developed its own chipset, codenamed Odin and the company is planning to install the processor in its forthcoming flagship device, Optimus G II that is expected to be released near the holiday season. This revelation emerge from a Korean publication over the weekend that has quoted an unknown LG official, who said that, “LG Electronics is going to mass-produce the Odin processors by using finer 28-nanometer level processing, applying high-k metal gate (HKMG) technology. The processors will be used in LG’s next flagship Optimus smartphone ― the Optimus GII ― which will probably be unveiled in this fall’s IFA trade fair. Odin is a major god in Norse mythology and the ruler of Asgard. LG Electronics hopes to make big impact on the global mobile application market…”
Nevertheless, this news was actually not a real revelation for many, as during the previous year it was reported that LG had decided to follow in the footsteps of big tech companies and it will try to produce its own processor, which will be installed in its smartphones. However, the real surprise is that the design of LG’s Odin is quite similar to Exynos 5 Octa of Samsung, as according to the report it also has eight cores, four Cortex-A7 and four Cortex-A15. According to PhoneArena, Odin is “designed in an ARM big.LITTLE architecture to provide superior performance/power consumption ratio.”
PhoneArena also reported that the LG official said, “Rather than use its own non-existent foundries, like Samsung does, LG has tasked TSMC with the process.” LG has got the engineering capacity to build a chip if it wants but until any official confirmation comes from the manufacturer uncertainty will remain. On the other hand, if this news proves to be true then it means that LG has surely developed a beast to power its forthcoming smartphones because it could end up being a milestone for the company as it dared to take the challenge and end up producing a superlative processor from scratch.
Source: PhoneArena