Coming just a day after Qualcomm officially launched their Snapdragon 820 SoC, Samsung is today unveiling their latest flagship mobile part, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890.
The Exynos 8 Octa 8890 is built on Samsung’s 14 nm FinFET process like the previous Exynos 7 Octa 7420, and again is based on the a big.LITTLE configuration; though the big processing cores are a custom design this time around. The Exynos 7420 was comprised of four ARM Cortex A57 cores and four small Cortex A53 cores, and while the small cores in the 8890 are again ARM Cortex A53, the big cores feature Samsung’s “first custom designed CPU based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture”.
“With Samsung’s own SCI (Samsung Coherent Interconnect) technology, which provides cache-coherency between big and small cores, the Exynos 8 Octa fully utilizes benefits of big.LITTLE structure for efficient usage of the eight cores. Additionally, Exynos 8 Octa is built on highly praised 14nm FinFET process. These all efforts for Exynos 8 Octa provide 30% more superb performance and 10% more power efficiency.”
Another big advancement for the Exynos 8 Octa is the integrated modem, which provides Category 12/13 LTE with download speeds (with carrier aggregation) of up to 600 Mbps, and uploads up to 150 Mbps. This might sound familiar, as it mirrors the LTE Release 12 specs of the new modem in the Snapdragon 820.
Video processing is handled by the Mali-T880 GPU, moving up from the Mali-T760 found in the Exynos 7 Octa. The T880 is “the highest performance and the most energy-efficient mobile GPU in the Mali family”, with up to 1.8x the performance of the T760 while being 40% more energy-efficient.
Samsung will be taking this new SoC into mass production later this year, and the chip is expected to be featured in the company’s upcoming flagship Galaxy phone.
Full PR after the break.
Seoul, Korea – Nov. 12, 2015 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the newest member of its Exynos family of application processors, the Exynos 8 Octa 8890. This chip is Samsung’s second premium application processor built on 14mm FinFET process technology. Unlike the previous Exynos 7 Octa 7420, the Exynos 8 Octa is an integrated one-chip solution that features the company’s first custom designed CPU based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture and the latest LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem. This brings a new level of performance to Samsung’s Exynos processor premium line-up for mobile applications.
“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 core 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.”
The Exynos 8 Octa is Samsung’s first application processor to include the company’s initial premium custom CPU cores based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture providing over 30 percent improvement in performance and 10 percent in power efficiency compared to the Exynos 7 Octa. This chip also supports enhanced heterogeneous multiprocessing for efficient usage of the eight cores, four custom and four ARM® Cortex®-A53, to deliver the highest performance and power efficiency in its class.
The Exynos 8 Octa is Samsung’s first integrated one-chop solution in its premium line-up that combine the application processor and modern. Samsung has delivered one-chip Exynos solutions for mid to high-end smartphone in recent years. The Exynos 8 Octa integrated the most advanced LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem that enables maximum download speed of up to 600Mbps (Cat.12) and upload speed of up to 150Mbps (Cat.13) with carrier aggregation. With such a high data transfer rate, the Exynos 8 Octa will contribute to delivering an excellent mobile experience, allowing users to enjoy and share high resolution video content on the go with ease. Also the one-chip solution benefits OEMs with a reduced number of parts needed and overall space required for a device, allowing more flexible design options.
For a graphic-intensive user interface, highly immersive 3D gaming and life-like virtual reality experiences, the Exynos 8 Octa employs ARM®’s latest GPU, Mali™–T880.
Samsung plans to begin mass production of the Exynos 8 Octa in late 2015.
For more information about Samsung’s Exynos products, please visit www.samsung.com/exynos.
Interesting to see a custom
Interesting to see a custom core be used in the big.LITTLE configuration!
Im kinda pset that they didnt
Im kinda pset that they didnt make it a single quad core SoC with clock variations that are enough to make it battery efficient.
though that 12-core GPU seems pretty dope
A 12 core chip running ARM
A 12 core chip running ARM holdings’ Reference cores is not that great, as Apple’s custom A7 Cyclone cores can execute twice the IPC as any of ARM holdings Reference cores(A53, A57, A72). Now the other cores in the Exynos processor that are custom cores, well what are the IPC for them. Are they extra wide order superscalar like the Apple Cyclone that can execute 6 IPC per core, or are they narrow cores like the ARM reference design cores, 3 IPC per core. I’m waiting for AMD to get the K12 info out there to find out if AMD’s custom ARM cores are going to have SMT capabilities, something that Apple’s custom ARMv8 ISA based cores does not even have.
Apple is a little TOO closed mouthed about their cores so not much info is available for A8/A8X Or A9/A9X. So it’s hard to compare Apple’s new products. One thing is for sure AMD’s Custom ARM products will be properly revealed in the specification sheets when K12 is RTM. K12’s cores will probably be used in some server variants, so the K12 micro-architecture/Core’s features will be discussed in detail on the professional server websites with plenty of proper CPU core details provided! Not like the consumer reviews that can only mention benchmarks and maybe core counts, and what crappy app ecosystem the Phone/Tablet SKUs are running.
6 Apple Cyclone cores could equal the IPC counts of 12 ARM Holdings’ A72 Reference cores, even with the ARM A72’s beefier core back-end, the ARM A72 is still 3 IPCs per core. If AMD’s K12 utilizes the Same Basic execution engine design tenets that Zen uses, and it’s only that the K12 is engineered to run the ARMv8a ISA, then K12 may just beat Apple’s line of custom ARM designs, especially if K12 uses SMT.
oh! so basicly all other
oh! so basicly all other solution just became obsolete in 24 hour flat! outch for all the phone but samsung