LG may soon be powering its next flagship with its very own chipset as the Korean manufacturer is rumored to come up with a second-generation NUCLUN chip.
The new NUCLUN 2 is the follow-up to the previous chipset that was released back in October 2014, which the company has added to a smartphone that was available exclusively to consumers in South Korea. The said device ended up being a flop, which could be attributed to the fact that the NUCLUN processor was found to be one generation behind the chips from Chinese-based rivals such as Huawei and MediaTek.
Still, the venture proved that LG has the know-how in making its own line of processors. With the NUCLUN 2, the company may have yet to successfully redeem itself from its past failure by coming up with a powerful chip.
LG touts the NUCLUN 2 as a type of chip that features the so-called "big.LITTLE" setup. It's purported to be based on the ARM reference cores of Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72, the latter running at 2.1GHz while the former is at 1.5GHz.
With these features, LG's new chip could pose a threat to Samsung's Exynos 7420, which is one of the reasons behind the powerful performance of the Galaxy S6. While Samsung may have an edge with its 14nm FinFET chips compared to LG's 16nm, the Exynos 7420 is equipped with four Cortex-A53 cores, which are also clocked at 2.1Ghz.
The second-generation NUCLUN chip also popped up recently in Geekbench, revealing just how much more powerful it is than the Exynos 7420. According to the results, the NUCLUN 2 scored 1796 points against the 1486 points earned by the Exynos in the single-core test. The same higher score was attained in the multi-core test, where the NUCLUN 2 ended up with 5392 points, easily overshadowing the 4970 points earned by the Exynos 7420.
LG is expected to start mass producing the chipset in the second half of 2016. If this is true, LG fans can safely assume that the upcoming G5 flagship could be powered by the NUCLUN 2 chipset. There's also the notion that the company will come up with several variants of its next flagship, similar to what Samsung usually does when it's releasing its own flagship devices.
