Samsung has just announced its new top-end chipset, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890. Like its Qualcomm competitors, it squeezes everything it needs into a single slab of silicon.
In fact, this is the first Samsung flagship system to be fully integrated into a single chip and only the second to be based on the 14-nanometre transistor manufacturing technique known as FinFET, which uses a 3D design to improve efficiency. The CPU itself is based on a 64-bit ARM architecture, using four custom and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores.
Alongside the CPU is ARM’s Mali-T880 GPU, which Samsung promises can provide “highly immersive 3D gaming and life-like virtual reality experiences.” Elsewhere, an LTE modem has also been squeezed into the chipset, providing mobile data download speeds of up to 600Mbps and upload speeds of up to 150Mbps. There aren’t any details of how this all ties in with battery usage, though Samsung claims the CPU is 10 per cent more efficient that that found in the Exynos 7 Octa.
All in, it sound fairly comparable to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 system-on-a-chip. Time will tell how they actually work in the wild.
[Samsung]