The Korean IT publication ET News recently published an article saying that the GS4 Mini isn’t going to launch in South Korea. Buried in that article was this little nugget:

“The Galaxy S4 Mini, a mid-range version of the Galaxy S4, will be unveiled in overseas markets including Europe early next month. The 4.3-inch Galaxy S4 Mini is expected to be equipped with a quad core processor and an 8-megapixel camera.”

I was expecting this phone to be announced at the end of May, so I’m a little upset we’ll have to wait until early June, but that’s not really a big deal. What I want to focus on is the processor.

There’s a rumor floating around the internet that says the GS4 Mini is going to use a brand new Samsung chip called the Exynos 5210. Judging by the model number, that means the GS4 Mini could potentially use ARM’s ultra fast, and very power hungry, Cortex A15 processor.

At first I wanted to ignore this rumor, because stuffing an ARM Cortex A15 inside a midrange phone sounds absolutely insane, but then I started thinking about why this might actually be true. The Exynos 5410 Octa inside the GS4 is physically huge, and making it probably isn’t easy. Some of the chips that came out of Samsung’s fabs likely failed some tests. Instead of throwing those chips in the garbage, Samsung probably disabled some of the cores and simply ran some new tests to see if they’ll pass the less stringent requirements.

With ET News saying the GS4 Mini will have a quad core processor, I’m starting to think that means it’ll have two ARM Cortex A15 cores and two ARM Cortex A7 cores, which is rather exciting.

Now all we really need to know is the price. The GS3 is already 400 EUR in many markets, and the GS3 Mini can be had for sub 300 EUR. If the GS4 Mini comes in at any higher than 450 EUR, I just don’t see who would want to buy it.