Samsung unveils its next-generation SoC, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890
The company took to its blog to unveil the Exynos 8 Octa 8890, which will likely power the company’s next line of premium smartphones in some markets.
The Octa 8890 is built on the latest 14nm, FinFET process technology. In comparison to the Exynos 7 Octa 7420 (the chip in the Galaxy S6 and Note 5), the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 is an integrated, one-chip solution based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture and the latest LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem.
The Exynos 8 also performs heterogeneous multi-processing across eight cores. There are four custom and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, which Samsung says should deliver good performance with high power efficiency. Additionally, the chip supports display resolutions up to 4K. The Exynos 7420 also used eight cores in a "bigLITTLE" configuration, but they were all ARM designs—none of them were custom cores.
Why this matters: This year, Qualcomm broke with tradition and used its own Exynos chip in its flagship phones all across the world, where in the past it had used top-tier Snapdragon chips in some markets and Exynos chips in others. There's no telling exactly which way Samsung will go for next year's phones: the Snapdragon 820 looks very promising, too. Even if Samsung chooses that chip for its next Galaxy phones, it's likely to ship a variant with this new Exynos processor in some markets.