SAMSUNG

Exynos 9820: Galaxy S10 processor boasts artificial intelligence and improved efficiency

Samsung is gradually outlining how its next generation of phones will be. Whatever it's called, the successor to Galaxy S9 will see the light between February and March of next year. It will do it with One UI, a rethought interface from its foundations, and the newcomer Exynos 9820, a new high-end processor that also looks at artificial intelligence applied to task optimization.The Exynos 9820 comes in a manufacturing process at 8 nanometers, just below the 10 nanometers that repeated the last generation, but slightly above the 7 nanometers that we see in competitors processors - Apple A12 and Hisilicon Kirin 980 of Huawei, basically - manufactured by TSMC. Is this bad news? Not necessarily. We have already seen as one who arrives before a process with greater miniaturization is not able to optimize it ideally due to various technical difficulties. So there really are big changes inside, plus the typical incremental jumps in energy efficiency or gross power. They remain eight cores, but now only two are designed by the brand itself. Recall that in 2017 Samsung's own cores were redesigned to be much larger and more powerful, which yielded good figures in mononuclear processing - which this year increased again by 20% and another 15% in multi-core - but did so at It's a crucial element: the battery. The important thing is what this chip can do and how it does it.In this generation they replace two of those cores by ARM designs. The Cortex A75 are more than proven, and although they are not the most modern of its kind, they will be dedicated in general to the most demanding multitasking. Closing the processor as such we see four more cores of low consumption, Cortex A55, focused on tasks of low exigency as the activity in the background. Globally, Samsung promises up to 40% improvement in energy efficiency for the processor.
In this generation the GPU also refreshes, moving from the Mali G72 cores to the Mali G76, now up to twice as powerful. This means that with a lower number of cores -12 compared to 18 last year-, graphical performance increases by up to 40%. Also, if we maintain graphical performance at similar levels, the new GPU provides energy savings of up to 35%.But it is not there, as this chip dares the video in 8K resolution that we already see on some television commercially. If we prefer, we can also record in 4K resolution to a maximum of 150 fps.As expected, the new generation Exynos supports UFS 3.0 storage, which will bring bandwidth and read / write speeds that duplicate current ones.As far as connectivity is concerned, Samsung avoids mentioning the 5G in this new semiconductor. Instead, it talks about its 'LTE-Advanced Pro' modem, which is nothing more than a category 20 LTE modem, with 8-band and 3-band Carrier Aggregation on download and upload respectively. This modem delivers maximum speeds of up to 2 Gbps (down) and 316 Mbps (up).

NPU for artificial intelligence on your phone
Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are small modules embedded in the phone chipset designed for the tensor calculation that is applied in auto-learning tasks. Both Apple and Huawei already make use of them - for the second time in the case of the Kirin 980 -, and Qualcomm has its particular approach with a own DSP. Samsung gets on the car with the Exynos 9820.
According to data from the manufacturer, this NPU is up to 7 times faster than the processor last year in processing tasks related to artificial intelligence. This will allow you to learn better from the uses with the phone to later regulate the energy consumption better and, of course, to predict better settings in complex photographic scenes. In addition, Samsung advances that the new design consumes up to 10% less than its predecessor.
The Exynos 9820 improves practically everything to its predecessor, but so does the competitor's products, and will have it difficult to get closer to the Apple Bionic A12. Perhaps where more will be noticed the improvement is in the section of efficiency.


H. T.