Samsung announces its next generation octa core flagship SoC, the Exynos 8890, which will possibly feature in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7
In a surprise announcement held in Korea, Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 8890, the new flagship SoC for upcoming Samsung flagship smartphones. The new SoC is manufactured via 14nm FinFET process that Samsung uses on its current Exynos 7420 SoC. The Exynos 8890 also marks the entry for Samsung into custom-built core segment. Prior to this, Samsung had been using ARM’s custom-core design.
The new Exynos 8890 features an octa-core CPU comprising of 4+4 CPU clusters, arranged in big.LITTLE design. Samsung has used four Cortex-A53 cores in the smaller cluster, and on the big cluster, there are four custom cores developed by Samsung, named 'M1'. Samsung hasn't revealed the clock speeds, but it does claim that the new SoC is 30% more powerful and 10% more power efficient, when compared to the Exynos 7420. It says that the big.LITTLE design is made more coherent with the help of SCI (Samsung Coherent Interconnect) technology, which works to offer better interaction between the two separate core clusters.
The Exynos 8890 uses the latest Mali GPU, the Mali-T880, which also powers the graphics of the newly unveiled chipset by Huawei, the Kirin 950. However, unlike the Kirin 935 which uses a four-core MP4 variant of the GPU, the Exynos 8890 uses the 12-core MP12. This, till date, is the biggest Mali core implementation. The new chip offers support for up to 4K resolution (4096×2160 pixels). Currently, there is only one smartphone which features a 4K resolution – the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium.
This is also the first time that Samsung has integrated the modem module into the SoC. The new, integrated modem supports Category 12/13 LTE with Carrier Aggregation, offering downlink speeds upto 600Mbps, and uplink speeds of upto 150Mbps.
Rumours have already started about the next Samsung galaxy flagship, the Galaxy S7, which might be powered by the new Exynos 8890 SoC, and is expected to be announced in February 2016.
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