Just when Qualcomm thought it had the Best SoC of 2012 award in the bag, Samsung has unveiled the world’s first Cortex-A15 and Mali-T604 SoC: The Exynos 5 Dual.

Let’s dive straight into the specs: The Exynos 5 Dual (5250) is a dual-core Cortex-A15 design clocked at 1.7GHz, built on Samsung’s 32nm HKMG process. There’s support for 800MHz LDDR3 RAM, and total memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec. In a first for mobile devices, there’s also USB 3.0 support.

On the graphics side of things, the Mali-T604 is ARM Holdings’ next-generation GPU, based on the new Midgard architecture — and as a result, its specs are pretty awesome. At a high level, there’s support for OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.1 full profile, DirectX 11, Wi-Fi Display, 1080p video playback at 60 fps, and output resolutions up to 2560×1600. At a low level, the main difference over its predecessor (Utgard-based Mali-400 series) is the transition to unified shader cores — the T604 (in the Exynos 5 Dual) has four of them, but there’s also a bunch of tablet-oriented eight-core parts, too.

In terms of actual performance, no one has benchmarked a Midgard-based GPU — but the Samsung Exynos 5 whitepaper says that the T604 “delivers two times better GPU performance than Exynos 4,” i.e. the Mali-400. This should mean that the T604 will be the fastest GPU on the block, beating out the Adreno 320 in the Snapdragon S4 Pro, and probably the SGX GPUs found in Apple’s devices (and the upcoming OMAP5 from Texas Instruments).

CPU-wise, the Exynos 5’s A15 cores will probably have comparable or slightly better performance than the Krait cores in the Snapdragon S4. On the other hand, the Exynos 5 Dual will probably arrive on the market at the same time as Qualcomm’s quad-core S4 Pro (later this year) — and, for the most part, four cores are better than two.

There’s no word on which device will be the first lucky recipient of the Exynos 5 Dual, but with a max output resolution of 2560×1600 it could be a tablet. More than a year ago, Samsung showed off a 10.1-inch 2560×1600 LCD panel — but as yet, it hasn’t been seen on the market. A Galaxy Tab 10.1 with Retina display in time for Christmas would be quite exciting. This could also be the SoC for the next Google Nexus smartphone, which should arrive before the end of the year.