LG Nuclun, first generation.
Right now, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 rules the roost in terms of Android performance. It’s the only chip currently shipping on 14nm, and it’s performance and power consumption are among the best high-end phones on the market, even if battery life is hampered by Samsung’s decision to go with a smaller battery pack. Now, it seems that the Korean company’s Exynos platform may have a new challenger to deal with, in the form of LG’s NUCLUN 2. This chip is the second iteration of LG’s efforts to build its own custom smartphone SoC, but the first design only shipped in a single design that I’m aware of (the LG G3 Screen), and it wasn’t a particularly strong performer.
The new NUCLUN 2 (pronounced NOO-klun), on the other hand, might be a serious headache for both Samsung and Qualcomm. Thus far, we’ve only seen a single benchmark result, but that test shows the Nuclun 2 beating the Samsung Exynos 7420 in both single and multi-threaded tests.
Nuclun2
Other information suggests the chip is a quad-core Cortex-A72, paired up with low-power Cortex-A53s. Top clock speed is supposedly 2.1GHz on the A72 and 1.5GHz on the A53’s. That’s a clock-for-clock match against the Exynos 7420, on both counts, which suggests the single-thread improvements from ARM’s next-generation CPU core are indeed significant. One interesting thing about these results, however, is that the Exynos 7420 loses by much less in the multi-threading test. This could mean that the early Nuclun 2 chips still have some bugs to be worked out — or it could indicate that the Cortex-A72 hits its thermal envelope more quickly than the Cortex-A57. We’ve discussed the suitability of mobile phone benchmarks before, and the truth is that while Geekbench is quite useful for examining underlying architectural features, it’s not a great way to judge the overall performance of a smartphone.
That said, most Android applications aren’t particularly well-threaded, and the Nuclun’s 20% higher score in that mode bodes well for devices that might use the chip, provided LG can deliver on the other features. There’s no word yet on what GPU technology LG might use, nor any information on overall power consumption. And of course, there’s still Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 to consider, with its new GPU and custom Kryo CPU core. LG is reportedly tapping TSMC’s 16nm for its new chip, and with TSMC now in volume production at that node, we should see the Nuclun 2 in devices by the end of 2015 or early in 2016.