Yesterday, Samsung announced its first metal-clad smartphone — the Galaxy Alpha. The compact powerhouse comes with a new Octa-core Exynos chip — branded the Exynos 5430 — details of which were just revealed by Samsung.

The Exynos 5430 is the first chip in the world to be built on Samsung’s 20nm HMKG fabrication process. The company states that a shift to a lower process node in itself allows for nearly 25% reduction in the power consumption of the chipset. For comparison’s purposes, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 and Nvidia’s Tegra K1 chips are still based on the 28nm HKMG process.

The chip makes use of ARM’s big.LITTLE technology and packs four high-performance Cortex-A15 clocked at 1.9GHz, and four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz. On the GPU side, AnandTech states that the Exynos 5430 comes with ARM’s Mali T628MP6 GPU, though the official announcement from Samsung does not mention anything about it.

Samsung’s latest chip also supports WQHD and WQXGA display, and keeps its power consumption in check by using Mobile Image Compression, Display Hibernation and other techniques.

On the modem side, this is the first time Samsung is using an ‘Exynos Modem’ branded radio on its chipset. The Exynos Modem 303 found inside the Exynos 5430 supports Cat. 6 LTE networks for download speeds of up to 300Mbps and upload speed of up to 50Mbps. It also includes many advanced power saving techniques like Envelope Tracking and Average Power Tracking (APT) to conserve battery life.

The company’s announcement also confirmed that the 12MP camera inside the Galaxy Alpha has an ISOCELL CMOS sensor.