As Mobile World Congress draws near, more information is coming out about all the new phones from key players in the industry. One such hotly expected family of smartphones will be 7th generation of Galaxy phones, more commonly known as the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge and S6 Edge+ mobile phones.
Samsung Galaxy S7, codenamed SM-G930F (the international version of S7) is expected to use a ‘Exynos 8890 version 7.0’ processor. From the information we managed to obtain, it will use Gen2 14nm FinFET process, designed and manufactured in Austin, TX. Given that 14nm is starting to look like a long node for Intel as well, as we reported yesterday – it is of no surprise that 2017 should see Galaxy S8 processor manufactured using the Gen3 14nm FinFET process. Exynos 8890 should put to bed all the rumors of Galaxy S7 phone abandoning Exynos processors entirely.
The company decided to split the strategy, and will sell a higher-volume S7 with Exynos 8890, while Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 will power the more expensive and elusive Galaxy S7 Edge. Both Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 are manufactured using the same Gen2 14nm FinFET process. This represents a break from S6 and S6 Edge / S6+ and S6 Edge+ models, all of which used in-house Exynos processors.
ARM’s big.LITTLE strategy came to life with Samsung Exynos processors, and is set to continue in the future.
Exynos 8890 is the highest performing member of Exynos 8 Octa family. As the name of the product implies, we’re talking about an 8-core SoC which continues to use the big.LITTLE core architecture which was launched by ARM Holdings almost four years ago. This is the first System-on-a-Chip design by Samsung which carries the same signature feature as a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which is a single-chip design that combines compute and communications. More precisely, Exynos 8890 consists out of four big 64-bit Samsung.M1 cores, four ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Mali-T880 GPU and LTE Rel.12 Cat. 12/13 modem. This modem will deliver up to 600Mbps, if the telecom carrier supports the bandwidth in question (600Mbps is a theoretical maximum for 4G LTE Cat. 12).
Besides Galaxy S7, Exynos 8890 will also be used in Samsung Smart TV lineup, just like its predecessor, Exynos 7420.
The rest of the specs are quite simple – 5MP front camera, 12MP rear camera (don’t worrry, final production unit will use a higher-resolution part), and a 5.1″ 2560×1440 AMOLED display.
