After several leaks Samsung has made the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 official. It is based on 14nm FinFET process technology, similar to the Exynos 7 Octa that was introduced earlier this year, but this uses the company’s first custom designed CPU cores based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. Instead of ARM Cortex-A57 cores and Cortex-A53 cores in the Exynos 7 Octa, this uses four custom cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores. It also uses heterogeneous big.LITTLE structure for efficient usage of the eight cores, similar to its earlier Exynos Octa processors.
The new Exynos 8 Octa with custom CPU cores will offer over 30% improvement in performance and 10% better power efficiency compared to the Exynos 7 Octa, says Samsung. It is also the first Samsung SoC in the premium line-up to include integrated one-chip solution that combines the application processor and modem.
It has LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem that offers maximum download speed of up to 600Mbps (Cat.12) and upload speed of up to 150Mbps (Cat.13) with carrier aggregation, packs the latest Mali–T880 MP12 GPU and supports up to 4K Ultra HD (4096×2160) display resolution. It should support UFS 2.0, eMMC 5.1 and LPDDR4 memory, but Samsung is yet to confirm those details.
Samsung said that the Exynos 8 Octa 8890 is expected to enter mass production late 2015. It is said to be used in the upcoming flagship Galaxy S7 smartphone that is expected to release in early 2016.
Commenting on the new Exynos 8 Octa SoC, Dr. Kyushik Hong, Vice President of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics, said:
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. 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.