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Before this year, Samsung launched the Exynos 7420, the first ARM-based SoC congenital on 14nm, and the flagship processor behind the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, and several other devices. Now, Samsung has announced the follow-up to its well-regarded FinFET debut — the Exynos 8890. Where the Exynos 7420 combined ARM's standard Cortex-A57 and A-53 in an eight-core big.Fiddling configuration, the Exynos 8890 will pair a ready of standard Cortex-A53 cores will a make-new custom architecture, codenamed Mongoose.

Early on reports indicate that the Mongoose should be a strong competitor for Apple and Qualcomm, with leaked Geekbench scores putting the Samsung M1 Mongoose at two,294 points in Geekbench's single-cadre examination, and 6,908 in multi-core tests. Put the bit in power-saving modes, and those results drop to ane,710 and 4,896 (ability saving) and 1,100 and 3,209 (ultra power saving). Current benchmarks of Apple's iPhone 6S put that device at 2540 for single-cadre performance (at 1849MHz) and 4441 for multi-cadre. In other words, Apple tree's Cyclone CPU would notwithstanding take an overall IPC advantage, just the M1 Mongoose could cut that gap to the narrowest nosotros've seen in years.

Other features of the Exynos 8890 include a new Samsung-congenital modem (one of the handful of serious LTE competitors Qualcomm faces), an ARM Mali-T880 GPU (upgraded from the Republic of mali-T760 in the Exynos 7420), and a custom interconnect to tie all the hardware together. Samsung is claiming that the Mongoose core offers a thirty% performance uplift over the Exynos 7420, and a ten% heave to ability efficiency. This is as well the commencement Samsung processor to combine the awarding processor and the modem into a single slice of silicon, which should farther better Samsung's margins on devices. These kind of gains are important to the visitor — with falling sales and steep contest from mainland Chinese vendors, Samsung needs to cut its BOM (bill of materials) price on the Milky way devices that it builds.

ARM has been a bit deficient with GPU details, simply the Mali-T880 is supposed to offer 1.8x the performance of Mali-T760 products at forty% free energy reduction for the same workloads, as shown below:

Mali-T880

The solution inside Samsung'south Mongoose is a Mali-T880MP12, a 50% improvement in GPU cores over the Mali-T760 that was used in previous generation Galaxy devices. That's serious GPU horsepower under the hood, and information technology could requite Samsung the firepower it'll need to compete with whatsoever adjacent-generation capabilities are baked into the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 or the inevitable A10 from Apple.

Samsung expects to begin mass production of the Exynos 8890 in late 2015, which suggests information technology'll utilize the hardware in its own Milky way S7 when that telephone debuts in 2016. There's no word on whether the device is congenital on 14nm LPE or 14nm LPP, but we'd be surprised if Samsung didn't shift to its ain 2d-generation 14nm technology as quickly as possible. Those gains could be part of the improvements folded into the xxx% functioning / 10% efficiency that the PR suggests is coming.

Samsung's move to design its own core, meanwhile, is a further sign that the chip manufacturer is serious near building its own credentials. Many of the summit fleck manufacturers are now moving away from the bog-standard Cortex cores that defined earlier efforts and trying to create additional value around customized hardware (while yet using ARM hardware to plug gaps in their lineup or build budget parts). Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia have all dabbled in this market, as has LG, with varying degrees of success. Information technology wouldn't surprise u.s. if the likes of MediaTek or Rockchip eventually climb on-lath as well.