Just ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung has today taken the wraps off its new in-house Exynos processor. The Korean giant may not have plans to unveil their flagship smartphone — Galaxy S8 at the trade show, but their processing powerhouse is surely making an appearance.
Through an official blog post, the company has revealed the Exynos 9 Series 8895 processor that will soon power most of its premium smartphones. It has been built using the 10nm FinFET process technology, which has been pioneered by Samsung. The same tech has further been extended to Qualcomm to enable the development of its latest Snapdragon 835 chips. Thus, this isn’t the first 10nm chip to be launched in the market.
As for the technology, the performance standards for the 10nm processor varies greatly when compared to its predecessors which are using the 14nm process. The latest 10nm processor packs an improved 3D transistor structure, which enhances its performance by 27 percent while consuming 40 percent less power.
Further, the Exynos 9 series 8895 processor is an octa-core processor comprising of four in-house designed ARM cores along with four power-efficient Cortex A-53 cores. It is coupled with the latest Mali-G71 GPU, which aims to minimise latency for 4K UHD VR and gaming experience. It is also one of the few processors to now include a gigabit LTE modem. The Exynos 9 chips are also said to deliver stable downlink of 1 Gbps using five carrier aggregation (or 5CA) and 150 Mbps uplink through the usual 2CA.
These eight-cores packed inside the Exynos 9 processor are managed by a heterogeneous system architecture, which means the chip can activate any number and combination of cores to perform a required task. This is one of the highlights of the processor, which is capable of performing heavy vision processing on the mobile itself. It even allows for faster computing, a necessity for deep learning and artificially intelligent applications.
Talking about the launch, Ben Hur, VP of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics says,
In addition to being built on the most advanced 10nm FinFET process technology, the new Exynos 9 Series 8895 incorporates Samsung’s cutting-edge technologies including a 2nd generation custom CPU, gigabit LTE modem, and more.
With industry leading technologies like VPU, the Exynos 8895 will drive the innovation of next-generation smartphones, VR headsets, and automotive infotainment system.
Samsung has now begun the mass-production of these 10nm Exynos 9 chips and they’re expected to power the soon-to-be-launched Galaxy S8. The Korean giant is delaying the launch of their flagship device to be more thorough with their internal checks. They want to avoid another mishap, similar to the explosive Galaxy Note 7 one. The Galaxy S8 is expected to debut at an exclusive event on 29th March in New York.
