Samsung announces 14nm soc that will probably come in Galaxy S6

Samsung has announced its first mobile soc making it at 14nm. Samsung makes the Exynos 7 Octa using its own finfet process. The Exynos 7 Octa will most likely come in the unannounced Galaxy S6.

Apart from the process, Samsung does not reveal much about the Exynos 7 Octa, although it has been clear for some time that it is an octacore SOC with four Cortex A57 cores and four more economical Cortex A53 cores. Samsung did this before with the Exynos 5433 in, among other things, variants of the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Alpha. However, the 5433 is a 20nm soc.

It will be the first soc that Samsung makes based on its own finfet process, which Samsung says it has been focusing on for years. In finfets, the gate of transistors is not fabricated over the channel, but lies around it. This creates a larger gate area, which means that the transistors can switch faster and, thanks to lower leakage currents, are more economical. In addition, the dimensions are smaller so that more transistors can fit on a silicon wafer, which should make it cheaper to manufacture the chips.

Samsung’s move to 14nm is coming soon. It was only last autumn that the South Korean giant released the first 20nm SOCs. Presumably, the manufacturer can quickly produce a lot of socs, because it also has a collaboration with Global Foundries for these processors. According to Samsung, 14nm finfet chips consume roughly 35 percent less than 20nm High-K-Metal-Gate variants, while the potential increase in performance would be 20 percent. The 14nm chips are 15 percent smaller.

The rumors about the Exynos 7 Octa have been going on for some time. In recent years, Samsung released its high-end devices in the Benelux with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon socs, but that seems to be different now. Qualcomm recently said that a major customer had decided not to include Snapdragon in its upcoming high-end device. In addition, it lowered the revenue forecast so much that many analysts concluded that it could only be Samsung. That manufacturer would have decided to only use this Exynos soc instead of Qualcomm’s competing Snapdragon 810.

Samsung has an event planned for two weeks, where it will most likely present the Galaxy S6 and an Edge variant thereof. Often it presents the soc that comes in the device around the time of the announcement of the device itself. That also happened last year with the S5.