If Apple uses the A5 chip in the upcoming iPhone 5 (which they will), it will be a performance beast with no other smartphone even coming close. There is not a single ARM chip currently on the market that would even come close to the performance offered by the A5 chip. Both NVIDIA Tegra 2 and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are behind Apple when it comes to benchmarking tools as well as real world performance.

To compete with this upcoming beast from Apple, Samsung is working on Galaxy II PLUS that will be based on their new Exynos chip running at 1.2 – 1.4GHz. The phone will have 1GB RAM, Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) and Samsung’s TouchWiz. Other hardware features will mostly remain the same as current Galaxy S II and the processor plus RAM update are mainly to address Apple’s upcoming threat. It will be interesting to see if Samsung will be able to match iPhone 5’s performance or fall short like they did with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 even after copying Apple’s iPad 2.