Samsung has just announced the next generation of its flagship Exynos System-on-Chip (SoC), the Exynos 9820. This SoC is likely to power the upcoming flagship smartphones from Samsung including upcoming Samsung Galaxy S10, S10 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10. It is possible that this SoC will also power the upcoming foldable smartphone from the company. Exynos 9820 is the successor to the current generation Exynos 9810 that is currently powering the Galaxy S9, S9 Plus and the Galaxy Note 9. For context, Exynos is the in-house SoC by Samsung and acts as a direct competitor to Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 800 series. Thought the company launches its flagship devices with both the Exynos as well as the Snapdragon flagship SoCs.
Diving deeper in the newly launched Exynos 9820, the SoC is made with an 8nm LPP FinFET manufacturing process in comparison to the 10nm LPP FinFET manufacturing process used to make its predecessor. The SoC comes with an Octa-core CPU with two, fourth generation custom CPUs, two Cortex-A75 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores. Samsung claims that the fourth generation custom cores provide 20 percent improvement in single core and 15 percent improvement in multi-core performance along with 40 percent improvement in power efficiency.
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The new SoC comes with new Mali-G76 GPU that offers 40 percent improvement in performance and 35 percent improvement in power saving. The SoC also finally comes with an integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to handle machine learning tasks.
Talking about the connectivity that Samsung has baked in Exynos 9820, to break it to you, there is no 5G connectivity here. Instead, the SoC comes with LTE-Advanced Pro modem that offers downlink speed of 2.0Gbps with carrier aggregation and 316Mbps uplink. Samsung has added support for UFS 3.0 (Universal Flash Storage).
Last but not least, Samsung has added support for encoding and decoding 4K video at 150 fps to the multi-format codec (MFC) in the Exynos 9820. The MFC will also render colors in 10-bit which means more accurate colors. The Image signal processor (ISP) of the Exynos 9820 will support up to five camera sensors which mean that rumors of three camera sensors on the back of S10 may be true after all (considering the company goes for a dual camera set up on the front). The SoC will also support encoding and decoding videos in 8K at 30 fps.
