This year's Mobile World Congress has given us quite a few new phones, but it has also given us new chips to power those phones. Earlier this week, we looked at a new quad-core 64-bit chip from MediaTek, four- and eight-core 64-bit chips from Qualcomm, and a flagship Snapdragon 801 chip that is only really "new" in the broadest sense of the term. While it didn't announce the 64-bit "Exynos Infinity" chip that some rumor sites were expecting, Samsung has also announced a pair of 32-bit SoCs: a new Exynos 5 Octa variant and a brand-new Exynos 5 Hexa.

The new Exynos 5 Octa (model number 5422) combines four 1.5GHz Cortex A7 cores and four 2.1GHz Cortex A15 cores in ARM's big.LITTLE configuration. For those not familiar with big.LITTLE, it attempts to maximize performance and minimize power consumption by offloading performance-intensive tasks to faster CPU cores (here, the A15s) and leaving lighter, less-important tasks to slower but more power-efficient cores (the A7s).

The chief difference between this new chip and the Exynos Octa 5420 from a year ago is that the 5422 will be able to use all eight of its CPU cores simultaneously if the workload demands it, while the old one could only use a total of four CPU cores at once. Per an announcement from back in September it's possible that the 5420 could be configured to use all eight cores (a configuration known as big.LITTLE MP), but we haven't seen that implementation in any shipping devices. Both the 5420 and 5422 share the same 28nm Samsung manufacturing process and the same ARM Mali T628 MP6, but according to AnandTech, the maximum clock speeds of both the A15 and A7 cores in the 5422 are a little faster.

The Exynos 5422 will ship in certain international variants of the Galaxy S5, although most of the focus at Monday's announcement was on the Qualcomm-powered version that will be coming to the US and other territories. Samsung has used an identical approach for the S III, the S4, and a number of other phones—North America gets Qualcomm, many other countries get an Exynos.

The six-core Exynos 5 Hexa (model number 5260) uses the same big.LITTLE MP implementation as its eight-core cousin, but it includes four 1.3GHz Cortex A7 cores and only two 1.7GHz Cortex A15 cores. The chip will have lower maximum performance, but having fewer "big" cores may reduce the total power consumption depending on what you're using your phone or tablet for. We don't know for sure what manufacturing process or GPU the chip will use, but AnandTech speculates that it will be a 28nm chip with a weaker ARM Mali T624 GPU. Both chips should be available for use in shipping devices now.