The newest generation of Sytem on Chip for mobile devices
has just been announced this week, most notably those from Samsung and Qualcomm
– the Exynos 8 and the Snapdragon 820.
On one end, we have Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820, which
will power the next generation flagship devices from various manufacturers. The
chip will comes with a quad-core 64-bit Kryo cores that can be clocked up to
2.2 GHz and an Adreno 530 GPU, which will reportedly offer up to 40%
performance improvement over its predecessor.
The chip will of course support LTE connectivity up to Cat.12
and Cat.13. There will also be support for Wi-Fi ac connection (with 2x2
MU-MIMO) as well as support for 4K displays, up to 28MP cameras, UFS 2.0,
LPDDR4 1866MHz dual-channel memory, USB 3.0, NFC and the company’s Quick Charge
3.0 technology.
The chip will be manufactured using the 14nm FinFET process
and should be available starting next year.
On the other hand, there’s the new Samsung Exynos 8 Octa
8890 that is made using the same process as the Snapdragon 820.
The chip will feature custom cores in a big.LITTLE
configuration. According to Samsung, this new generation of chip is expected to
provide a 30% improvement in performance over its predecessor thanks to what
the company calls Coherent Interconnect technology.
An integrated modem will also be available for the new
Exynos chip, which just like the Snapdragon 820 will support Cat 12/13
connections. The chip will feature a Mali-T880 GPU with twelve cores and will
have support for 4K displays.
Samsung is yet to provide information on when the chip will
be available.
