With Apple's A12 Bionic chip and Huawei's Kirin 980 processor already out there, Samsung isn't leaving anything on the table in the SoC race. The South Korean tech giant has announced today its take on native artificial intelligence processing for mobile devices: the Exynos 9 Series 9820 processor.
Samsung's latest flagship application processor features a fourth-generation custom CPU, 2Gbps LTE Advanced Pro modem, and an improved neural processing unit (NPU) that's supposed to deal with AI and machine learning tasks separately. That means the main CPU itself will be freed from that burden. The NPU also makes it possible to perform AI processing on the device instead of relying on a remote server, speeding up the task in the process.
Samsung says the Exynos 9820 provides some decent performance improvements over its predecessor, with the fourth-gen custom core offering around 20% single core performance boost. The multi-core performance also receives around 15% boost and the processor incorporates the latest Mali-G76 GPU cores for what Samsung claims to be a 40% performance improvement.
Additionally, the Exynos 9820 brings support for 4K UHD video encoding and decoding at 150 frames per second (fps) and renders colors in 10-bit. Samsung plans to begin mass production for the processor by the end of this year.
With Exynos being traditionally embedded in Samsung's flagship phones sold outside the U.S., the Exynos 9820 is expected to power the rumored Galaxy S10 as the company aims to position the new processor for its future premium devices.
