Samsung unveils Exynos 8890 soc with custom cores

Samsung presents its new high-end soc: the Exynos 8 Octa. It is a chip with four large, self-designed cores for heavy tasks, assisted by four economical Cortex-A53 cores for light work. The modem, with support for 4g up to 600Mbit/s, is now part of the chip.

Samsung is going to make the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 on its own 14nm finfet process. Mass production will begin at the end of 2015. Presumably, the soc will find its way to the Samsung Galaxy S7, which is expected in the spring of 2016. The soc is the successor to the Exynos 7 Octa 7420, which is used in the Galaxy S6 series.

In the new soc, Samsung again uses a Big.Little design, a combination of four fast and four energy-efficient cores. Where the previous chip still used ARM Cortex A57 cores, Samsung has now designed four powerful cores based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. These are assisted by the Little part, which is equipped with four Cortex-A53 cores. Samsung gives little information about the self-designed cores, which are given the name Exynos M1. The clock speed is not yet known. The chipmaker does claim 30 percent better performance and 10 percent better efficiency compared to the Exynos 7 Octa.

The Exynos 8 Octa 8890 is Samsung’s first all-in-one soc, because the modem is now also integrated. A separate modem chip had to be used for the Exynos 7 Octa. There is support for lte-cat12 and -cat13 in the new chip. That is good for theoretical download and upload speeds of 600Mbit/s and 150Mbit/s.

For the graphics processing, Samsung uses a Mali-T880 MP12 GPU, ARM’s most powerful GPU design. The computing power compared to the Exynos 7 Octa is therefore probably doubled. That chip has a Mali-T760 in an MP8 configuration. The GPU supports 4k images. It is striking that Samsung also mentions wquxga support: a resolution of 3840×2400 pixels with a 16:10 ratio. There are currently no products on the market that use this resolution. It could indicate that Samsung is working on a device that has a wquxga screen. A tablet is then the most obvious.

Competitor Qualcomm recently unveiled its Snapdragon 820, also a soc with self-designed cores. However, Qualcomm has moved away from the Big.Little design and only uses its four proprietary Kryo cores. Smartphones with the Snapdragon 820 are expected in early 2016. Benchmarks will then have to show which soc offers the best performance.