Samsung’s Snapdragon 820 competitor, Exynos 8890 octa-core chip official

Samsung has officially announced its next generation smartphone processor. Just days after Qualcomm revealed the super-powered quad-core Snapdragon 820, Sammy has unveiled the octa-core Exynos 8890, which could make it to next year’s Galaxy S7 in select markets…

Like the SD820, the Exynos 8 Octa is an integrated one-chip solution boasting 64-bit architecture and Cat. 12 LTE support, and is also built on the 14-nanometer FinFET process. Samsung promises this means you’ll get up to 30 percent increase in performance over the Exynos 7 Octa, and 10 percent better power efficiency. To build it, Samsung has combined 4 custom cores with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores in a way that allows for ‘enhanced heterogeneous multi-processing for efficient usage of the eight cores’. In English, that means the chip can handle all kinds of tasks, and spreads the workload efficiently over all eight cores of the processor. As for graphics processing, that is provided by the ARM Mali-T880 GPU.

Category 12 LTE support means the chip can handle up to 600Mbps LTE downloads and 150Mbps uploads with carrier aggregation. Essentially, making it future-proof for upcoming changes to LTE networking technology. For manufacturers, the key benefit (apart from the insane promised performance) is that everything is built in to one, small part. That means OEMs can be more flexible in their logic board and smartphone designs.

“The Exynos 8 Octa is a leading-edge application processor for next-generation mobile devices that incorporates Samsung’s mobile technology leadership in CPU, ISP, and modem as well as process technology,” said Dr. Kyushik Hong, Vice President of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. “With our custom designed CPU cores and the industry’s most advanced LTE modem, consumers using mobile devices with the Exynos 8 Octa will experience a new level of mobile computing.”

Samsung’s Exynos 8 Octa chip will go in to mass production towards the end of this year, and will likely feature in next year’s flagship smartphones and tablets. Devices like the upcoming Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge will — more than likely — ship with this chip in markets outside China and the US.