Samsung’s next soc for midrange smartphones has a neural network chip

Samsung has presented the next soc for midrange smartphones. The Exynos 7 9610, nominally the successor to the soc from the Galaxy A8 smartphone from earlier this year, has a vision image processing unit with neural network for AI tasks.

This vision image processing unit consists of a regular dsp and a chip with dsp that the manufacturer has focused on for tasks that companies classify as artificial intelligence in 2018. The neural network should help the software to recognize faces in photos that are partly covered by, for example, a hat and should assist with photos of which users want to blur the background, claims Samsung. The isp supports recording images at 4k resolution at 120fps or at 480fps at full HD resolution.

The soc has four Cortex A73 cores at a maximum clock speed of 2.3GHz and four A53 cores at 1.6GHz. Samsung produces the processor cores on the second generation of its 10nm FinFet process. The gpu is a Mali G72MP3 and the specs state that the soc only supports lpddr4x memory. In the field of 4g, the modem supports lte cat 12, with a maximum download speed of 600Mbit/s and an upload of 150Mbit/s. Samsung’s high-end socs support 4G with a maximum connection of 1.2Gbit/s.

Samsung says the soc will go into mass production in the second half of this year. The 9610 falls into the Exynos 7 series. Samsung has used that series in recent years in the Galaxy A series of more expensive midrange phones, such as the A8, and before that the A5 2017 and A5 2016. It is unknown whether that will happen again.