Earlier this year Samsung’s Exynos 7 took down the Snapdragon 810 with a vengeance. The Snapdragon 810 had certain issues with heat, but it wasn’t just that which made the difference (though it appears to have lived up to its name). Samsung had equipped their Exynos 7 chipset with a thinner and more efficient 14 nanometer thread technology that essentially allowed for higher performance in a smaller area. And the next generation of the company’s own chipset doesn’t seem to disappoint, either.
While it’s still based on 14nm wire technology, the overall performance of the Exynos 8 is said to have been improved by 30 percent when compared to its predecessor. Energy efficiency has also gone up by 10 percent. Samsung is sticking to its eight-core system, while the Snapdragon 820 makes do with four. With the Exynos 8, half of them are standardized Cortex-A53 processors, while the other half are high performance and made in house. The graphics component is a Mali-T880, which supports 4K video, and is said to be 40 percent faster than its counterpart in the Exynos 7. To top it all off, the chip has an integrated LTE modem, a first for Samsung, as previous hardware had to have this on a separate electric circuit.
While previous rumors have suggested that the next flagship phone from Samsung will come equipped with a Snapdragon 820, that won’t necessarily be the case this time around. However, considering that Samsung has used different processors in the same phone models depending on market location, a similar situation is possible this time around. While some might argue that 4K resolution isn’t necessary on a smartphone, the extra fidelity could go a long way in Samsung and Oculus’s cooperative efforts to make mobile virtual reality as immersive as possible. We expect more information will be revealed in coming months, leading up to the expected launch of Samsung’s next flagship phone early next year.
