Samsung has announced that it has developed a new 45nm dual core mobile computing chip called the Orion. The Orion chipset is based on Dual Core ARM A9 technology and brings a 5 fold increase in graphical performance. The chipset is expected to ship to consumers towards the end of 2010 so consumers can expect devices with powered by the Orion towards Q3 2011.
Clock for clock, a 1 GHz Cortex A9 processor should be about 50% faster than today’s 1 GHz Cortex A8 processors thanks to the switch to out of order execution and a shallower 8 stage pipeline.
Interestingly , Symbian is the only operating system which supports this chipset.Considering how frugal the Symbian operating system is , this could theoretically leave a LOT of performance headroom for applications. It remains to be seen which manufacturer , if any , picks up the chip and actually produces consumer level hardware.