Samsung has announced the Exynos 9 processor much earlier than expected. The company issued a press release about its next generation of SoCs, which are being made on the 10nm FinFET manufacturing process.
The first of these processors, the Exynos 9 series 8895, will not only adopt the 10nm process but also use an improved 3D transistor structure. According to Samsung, this increased density of transistors translates into 27 percent better performance with 40 percent decrease in power consumption.
The Exynos 9 Series 8895 is an octa-core processor that combines four of Samsung’s own high performance cores with four Cortex-A53 cores. Interestingly, the SoC will also have a separate processing unit for dealing with iris and fingerprint recognition. This functions as an additional level of security for dealing with mobile payments. It also looks similar to what Apple has been doing with its fingerprint recognition.
Samsung has also fitted the Exynos 8895 with an embedded Vision Processing Unit. This VPU is dedicated to recognising objects and movement; and looks like it’s meant to improve the camera functions. That being said, the Galaxy S8 is rumoured to have an iris scanner; which could also make use of the VPU.
The Exynos 9 Series 8895 also fits an embedded gigabit LTE modem with five carrier aggregation. Samsung claims that this is the first of its kind, and will deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps over Cat 16 connections.
We are operating under the assumption that the first device to see the Exynos 9 Series 8895 will be the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8. Unfortunately, we do not have confirmation of this. Samsung itself has only said that the chips are currently in mass production. Considering that Samsung is not launching its next flagship phone at MWC next week, we may have to wait a lot longer to find out what this new chip is really capable of.
[Source: Samsung]
