Samsung Korea has just published a press release (Google Translate) saying their flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, will start shipping on all three Korean mobile operators tomorrow. What makes the Korean S4 special is that it has the Samsung made Exynos 5 octo-core chip.

Now before you start thinking eight is bigger than four, and therefore better, it should be noted that not all eight cores in the Exynos 5 are running at the same time. It’s a chip with two blocks of quad-core processors. One block has four ultra fast ARM Cortex A15 processors. The other block has four ultra slow, and highly power efficient, ARM Cortex A7 processors. When the phone needs to do something hard, it’ll use the A15 processors. When you’re checking your email, it’ll use the A7 processors.

I can’t tell you whether or not Samsung’s new chip is capable because I haven’t benchmarked it yet; I probably never will either. That being said, someone, probably Brian Klug from AnandTech, will get his hands on this baby at some point during the next few weeks.

Why is Samsung shipping two versions of the same phone? Funny you should ask that, because the head of Samsung Mobile, J.K. Shin, answered that very question earlier today. He says it’s a sourcing issue, which is a fancy way of saying Samsung’s chip simply wasn’t being made in enough quantities for the GS4 to ship on schedule.

If you’re considering buying a GS4, I say hold out for the one with the Samsung chip, simply because Samsung probably knows how to make their software fly on their hardware.