The processor is expected to power upcoming flagship smartphones from the Samsung including Galaxy S10 series and Note 10.
South Korean technology giant Samsung has unveiled its latest CPU for smartphones, the Exynos 9820. The processor is expected to power upcoming flagship smartphones from the Samsung including Galaxy S10 series and Note 10.
Apart from being more powerful and energy-efficient compared to its predecessor Exynos 9810, the processor – built on 8nm LPP (Low Power Plus) FinFET process – boasts of features such as a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), ability to record videos at an incredible 8K resolution, 2 Gbps LTE modem.
With Exynos 9820 at the heart, Samsung smartphones will have greater artificial intelligence capabilities. According to the company, the SoC’s dedicated NPU allows it to carry out AI-based activities up to seven times faster compared to its predecessor. This is achieved as the tasks are carried out on the device itself which would otherwise have to be sent to a server.
“As AI-related services increase and their utilization diversify in mobile devices, its processors require higher computational capabilities and efficiency,” Ben Hur, vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics said.
“The AI capabilities in the Exynos 9 Series 9820 will provide a new dimension of performance in smart devices through an integrated NPU, high-performance fourth-generation custom CPU core, 2.0Gbps LTE modem and improved multimedia performance,” he added.
The 4th-gen CPU comes tri-cluster architecture where 2x Custom CPU and 2x Cortex-A75 are dedicated for performance-intensive tasks whereas 4x Cortex-A55 CPUs focussing on power efficiency. According to Samsung, this configuration combined with Samsung’s intelligent task scheduler improves multi-core performance by 15 percent and single core performance by up to 20 percent while improving power efficiency by up to 40 percent.
On the graphics side, Samsung has equipped the processor with Mali-G76 MP12 GPU. Mali-G76, thanks to wider execution engines coupled with twice the number of lanes compared to its predecessor – processes tasks including AR and VR, at up to 40 percent improvement while delivering improved power efficiency of up to 35 percent.
For photography, Exynos 9820 sports image signal processor (ISP) which supports up to five sensors which allow the camera to capture 8K videos at 30fps, 4K UHD videos 150fps. The CPU uses physically unclonable function (PUF) technology for an improved level of security.
Coming to connectivity, Exynos 9820 comes with LTE-Advanced Pro modem with LTE Category 20 support which offers up to 2.0Gbps downlink speed with 8x carrier aggregation (CA) along with up to 316Mbps uplink speed. The modem delivers improved speed and reduces latency with features including 4×4 Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO), 256-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), and Enhanced Licensed-Assisted Access (eLAA).
Apart from these, the SoC support UFS 3.0 and UFS 2.1 storage technology and faster LPDDR4X RAM.
According to Samsung, the chipsets will be put to mass production by the end of this year and one can safely assume the upcoming flagship smartphone Galaxy S10 will be powered by one of these.
