Samsung has unveiled the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 SoC. This is the second premium processor Samsung has built on its 14nm FinFET process but the first ever to use Samsung's own custom design CPU, based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. Another important part of this SoC, for mobile device deployment, is the inclusion of the latest LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem.
The custom CPU design is trumpeted as being a USP for Samsung's processor "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," said Dr. Kyushik Hong, VP of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. In internal testing the custom CPU cores provided over 30 per cent improvement in performance and 10 per cent in power efficiency compared to the Exynos 7 Octa.
Not all of the 8 cores use Samsung's new custom design. The chip uses the four 64-bit ARMv8 custom CPU cores alongside four ARM Cortex-A53 cores to offer "the highest performance and power efficiency in its class," in a big.LITTLE configuration.
Turning to another of the Samsung Exynos 8 Octa 8890 SoC's key specifications, the LTE modem, this is said to provide maximum up/download speeds of 600Mbps (Cat.12)/150Mbps (Cat.13) with carrier aggregation.
Samsung's one-chip solution doesn't neglect graphics performance. The SoC designers have included ARM's latest Mali-T880 GPU to fling around the pixels, providing fast, responsive graphical intensive UI manipulation, immersive 3D graphics and punchy VR performance. Screen resolutions as high as 4K UHD (4096x2160) and WQUXGA (3840x2400) are supported by the Mali-T880.
It is expected that the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 will feature in next generation mobile devices, possibly starting with the Samsung Galaxy S7, early in 2016.
