Samsung Teases CES Announcement For Next Exynos SoC
by Ryan Smith on December 18, 2020 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- Samsung
- Arm
- Smartphones
- Exynos
- Samsung LSI
Samsung this morning has dropped as brief teaser about their next-generation Exynos SoC. Dubbed “Exynos is back”, Samsung is revealing that there will be a proper announcement for the new SoC on January 12, which would fall on the first full day of CES.
Being that this is a teaser, any details are non-existent. But it’s worth noting that Samsung is promising “A whole new Exynos is coming”. Which hopefully is a sign that Samsung has spent the last couple of years hard at work on improving their future designs.
Although the most recent high-end Exynos designs (e.g. Exynos 990) have been decent, they’ve been overshadowed by rival Qualcomm’s designs – not to mention Apple’s own market-leading parts. The last few iterations of the chip have used Samsung’s own in-house CPU core design, which never worked out quite as well as Samsung was hoping for, both in overall performance and in keeping ahead of Arm’s own licensable designs.
Fittingly, Samsung has previously confirmed that they'll be (back to) using Arm's cores in future designs, particularly the the Cortex-X1, Arm's big effort to double-down on overall CPU performance. So it's pretty much guaranteed that Cortex-X1 will show up in Samsung's next-gen SoC – especially if they want to compete with Qualcomm's X1-equipped next-gen Snapdragon.
In any case, we’ll have more on the matter in a few weeks, when Samsung makes their announcement. So stay tuned.
#Exynos_is_back
— Samsung Exynos (@SamsungExynos) December 18, 2020
A whole new Exynos is coming.
January 12th, 2021. pic.twitter.com/d85kT9Xvru
Source: Samsung Twitter
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wrkingclass_hero - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
It will be interesting to see if this is the chip that finally integrates an AMD GPU in its design.mmrezaie - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
I am not confident, but I have heard that would happen in the next iteration.Mobile-Dom - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
im almost certain this isnt going to be it, from all the leaks this is just going to be a monster mali GPUabufrejoval - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
I guess these days the technical differences may actually play second fiddle to the fabbing capacity.I'd assume this would be done on some Samsung partially EUV '5nm' process and thus in a different ballpark than TSMC.
QC 888 may be great, but little use if you have to stand in line to get it.
fuji_T - Friday, December 18, 2020 - link
you realize that EUV isn't required for every layer, right? Googling around, it is estimated that TSMC might use EUV on up to 14 layers. I googled around and some estimates put Samsung at 9 layers.Santoval - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
According to the comparison in the article below TSMC at 5nm use indeed 14 EUV layers (out of a total of 59) and Samsung at 5nm use 12 EUV layers (out of 58 total), while Samsung's 7nm node has 7(/58) EUV layers and TSMC's 7nm+ node has 6(/65) EUV layers.However TSMC's 5nm node is *far* denser than Samsung's 5nm node, while being quite less costly per wafer. TSMC's highest density 5nm variant has (up to) 173.1 million transistors per mm² (MTr/mm²) while Samsung's 5nm node has (up to) 126.5 MTr/mm². Samsung's 5nm node is only slightly denser than TSMC's 7nm+ node, due to Samsung being much more conservative in their design choices.
Samsung's 5nm node is basically TSMC's 7nm++ node, being a mere 33% denser than their 7nm node (i.e. 1/3 of a full node), while TSMC's 5nm node is 79.4% denser than their original 7nm node (8/10 of a full node), while being *cheaper*..
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/s...
tkSteveFOX - Sunday, December 20, 2020 - link
Both 888 and the new Exynos are being manufactured on the same node by Samsung, so at least they'll have equal grounds. It's the closest Samsung has gone in ages to catching up to QC. Remains to be seen if Sammy are using 8MB L3 cache for the X1 as opposed to QC sticking to 4MB for all big cores. This could make a difference for Sammy.As for the AMD gpu design, that should happen next year + the G78 is much better than G76. Huawei's Kirin 9000 already uses the full cluster, so GPU performance should be similar.
CarryBeat - Tuesday, December 22, 2020 - link
Year 2015Lord of the Bored - Monday, December 21, 2020 - link
Samsung announces that they will make an announcement in the future. Hooray.The_Assimilator - Tuesday, December 22, 2020 - link
Considering Exynos has been trash for the entirety of its existence, I don't forsee this new version being any better. But, Apple made magic with M1, maybe Samsung can finally polish this turd.