Samsung announces today its first-ever 7nm silicon chip the Exynos 9825. This places the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 to a very awkward situation. Although the upcoming smartphone still sources its SoCs from its very own Exynos 9820 SoC and also on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, it is now in a situation where it is pitting the 8nm silicon against the 7nm silicon from TSMC.
The new Exynos 9825 is a 7nm LPP refresh of the Exynos 9820. The latest chip from the South Korean tech and electronics giant appears like a die shrink or mid-cycle refresh with almost the same IP generation as the Exynos 9820. It still features the M4 Cheetah cores of Samsung and the Mali-G76 GPU. The South Korean tech giant appears to have not altered the clock frequencies of the new chip.
The M4 cores of the Exynos 9825 chip still run at the peak frequency of 2.73 GHz and the A55 cores run at 1.95 GHz. Anandtech reported that the new chip got a little bump in the middle cores frequencies rising up between 2.31 GHz and 2.4 GHz. On the GPU part, Samsung stayed with the same GPU setup as the Exynos 9820 utilizing the MP12 configuration of the G76.
Samsung shared that the GPU of the Exynos 9825 is clocked a little higher, which means it can outperform its predecessor. But the South Korean tech and electronics giant has not revealed yes the specific clock speeds of the new processor. The new Soc also retained Samsung's Shannon 5000, which is a category 20/13 modem.
This particular modem has a peak download rate of 2 Gbps with eight times carrier aggregation and uploads top at 316 Mbps. With this specs, many tech analysts are wondering if Samsung would be able to integrate a 5G modem on the Exynos 9825. However, from the looks of it, it appears that it is yet too early for that.
#Samsung
Samsung officially released the world's first 7nm EUV chip #Exynos9825.
It integrates a 4G LTE-A modem and can be used with the Exynos5100 modem for #5G.
CPU uses 2+2+4 total 8 core design, these three clusters are 2 custom cores, 2 Cortex-A75 & 4 Cortex-A55 cores. pic.twitter.com/c5VslrMwJw — Xiaomishka (@xiaomishka) August 7, 2019
Instead, the 5G can be achieved by pairing the Exynos 9825 with the 5G Exynos Modem 5100. Additionally, the latest chip is expected to be featured in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 10. It was recently reported that some units released in other regions will use Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chips, which could be a valid explanation why the new Soc from Samsung does not have major improvements in terms of CPU.
While the new Exynos 9825 chip from Samsung promises may things, the company needs to invest the improvements of the process in terms of power efficiency instead of increasing the performance of its SoC.
