Samsung Electronics is developing two new Exynos chips based on the 10nm process node technology — the Exynos 7885 and Exynos 9610 — which are planned to be commercialized in the near future, one industry insider said on Thursday. The Exynos 9610 is reportedly the more powerful of the two chips that will provide a small upgrade over the Exynos 8895 that debuted in the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus earlier this year. According to the source, the system-on-chip (SoC) will be equipped with eight 64-bit cores, four of which are of the ARM Cortex-A73 variety clocked at a maximum frequency of 2.4GHz. The other cluster is said to entail Cortex-A53 cores and be designed for battery-efficient performance. The silicon will reportedly feature a completely integrated LTE modem and be equipped with the Mali-G71 MP20 GPU, the same one that was already present in the Exynos 8895. It’s currently unclear which upcoming Samsung-made devices may be powered by the Exynos 9610, though the fact that the SoC apparently isn’t a massive upgrade over the company’s last flagship chip may indicate that the offering will be commercialized by the end of the year.
The Exynos 7885 is reportedly a mid-range product, though it’s also said to be built on the 14nm FinFET process and should hence be significantly more energy-efficient than its 16nm predecessors. The silicon will reportedly power the upcoming Galaxy A7 (2018) that was first sighted online just yesterday, boasting an unspecified hexa-core SoC with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores and two ARM Cortex-A73 ones, with the latter cluster being clocked at 2.1GHz and meant for performing resource-intensive tasks. The Mali-G71 graphics chip and an integrated LTE modem are also said to be part of the package that may not hit the market until early 2018.
Neither of the two rumored chips should power Samsung’s 2018 flagship series, i.e. the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 lineups. The Exynos 9610 itself was already the subject of another report from early June, with one insider claiming that the South Korean original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is looking to launch this piece of silicon in the final quarter of 2017 in an effort to compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 that’s currently at the very top of the upper mid-range market segment.
Update: The Exynos 7885 is actually a 14nm FinFET process and not a 10nm process.