It looks like Samsung could not wait until May 3rd for its Unpacked Event in London to unveil the SoC inside its hotly anticipated Galaxy S3. In a press release today, Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 4 Quad SoC, which will be powering its next Galaxy handset.

The Exynos 4 Quad SoC pack in four-physical Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1.4GHz each, and is made on the 32nm HKMG fabrication processor from Samsung. Sammy states that the Exynos 4 Quad provides nearly double the performance of the Exynos 4210 based on the 45nm fabrication process, while consuming 20% less power. While Samsung did not mention the exact GPU used inside the Exynos 4 Quad, rumors suggest that it packs in a higher clocked variant of the ARM Mali-400MP GPU.

Compared to the Exynos 4210, Exynos 4 Quad also features power gating for all the four cores, along with frequency and voltage scaling. Samsung also mentions that the Exynos 4 Quad is pin-compatible with the Exynos 4210, thus making the upgrade path of OEMs easier.

Frankly, I was really expecting the Samsung Galaxy S3 to use a dual-core A15 based processor. There is still very limited use of a quad-core SoC in mobile phones, and two faster A15 cores can easily outperform a quad-core SoC in real-life mobile usage.