Samsung Announces New 9810 SoC: DynamiQ & 3rd Gen CPU
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on January 3, 2018 10:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Samsung
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- S.LSI
- Exynos 9810
After teasing the Exynos 9810 in CES related press material back in early November as well as having early announcement about the new modem capabilities last summer we now finally see the official announcement of the new SoC ahead of CES next week.
The new Exynos 9810 much like the Snapdragon 845 announced a few weeks ago in December, is a major upgrade on the CPU side of things as we do the migration towards a DynamiQ cluster configuration. Here we find Samsung’s third-generation custom core, the Exynos M3. We don’t know much about the micro-architectural changes of the new core, however Samsung has stated that the new CPU has a wider pipeline, and improved cache memory. What we expect is a large overhaul of the memory subsystem in the private L2 cache, as well as a larger L3 which will bring major performance uplifts in memory access during heavy workloads. Coupled with the M3 cores we see ARM’s new A55 little cores used as the efficiency cluster.
| Samsung Exynos SoCs Specifications | ||
| SoC | Exynos 9810 | Exynos 8895 |
| CPU | 4x Exynos M3 @ 2.9 GHz 4x 512KB L2 ?? 4x Cortex A55 @ 1.9 GHz 4x 128KB L2 4096KB L3 DSU ?? |
4x Exynos M2 @ 2.314 GHz 2048KB L2 4x Cortex A53 @ 1.690GHz 512KB L2 |
| GPU | Mali G72MP18 | Mali G71MP20 @ 546MHz |
| Memory Controller |
4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4x @ 1794MHz |
4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4x @ 1794MHz 28.7GB/s B/W |
| Media | 10bit 4K120 encode & decode H.265/HEVC, H.264, VP9 |
4K120 encode & decode H.265/HEVC, H.264, VP9 |
| Modem | Shannon Integrated LTE (Category 18/13) DL = 1200 Mbps 6x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 200 Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 256-QAM |
Shannon 355 Integrated LTE (Category 16/13) DL = 1050 Mbps 5x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150 Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
| ISP | Rear: 24MP Front: 24MP Dual: 16MP+16MP |
Rear: 28MP Front: 28MP |
| Mfc. Process |
Samsung 10nm LPP |
Samsung 10nm LPE |
Samsung hasn't announced all of the new CPU parameters yet, but they have announced a 2.9 GHz maximum frequency for the M3 cluster, which is a large step up over the 2.3 GHz of the outgoing model. This is thanks to the Exynos 9810 being produced on the second generation 10nm manufacturing node, 10LPP, which promises up to 10% performance increases at isi-power or a 15% decrease in power at iso-performance.
With the increased IPC that is expected from the new cores, and the faster frequency, this should be a significant increase in performance from the outgoing model, which we saw in our comparison test was fairly evenly matched with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. Samsung claims up to double the single-thread performance and 40% uplift in multi-thread performance. The single-thread performance claim would be the single biggest performance jump in the industry and if we're even just talking simple GeekBench scores that would put the Exynos 9810 at the performance levels of Apple's A10 and A11. Of course having this on a quad-core CPU begs the question of how it's achieved and if this 2.9GHz clock is on all cores or just a single-core boost clock? And at what kind of TDP does it achieve this massive performance boost?
The GPU follows the lead of the Kirin 970 in adopting the new Mali G72 Heimdall GPU IP from ARM. What stands out here is that Samsung has actually decreased the GPU core count from 20 to 18 while still managing to increase performance through an increase of the clock frequency from 546MHz to a higher undisclosed frequency likely in the mid 700MHz range. The performance increase is conservative at only 20%, but more importantly efficiency should be up thanks to the new GPU and process.
The modem as disclosed earlier in 2017 now adheres to 3GPP Release 13 and implements UE Category 18 up to 1200Mbps in its downlink capabilities through up to 6xCA and 256-QAM, slightly exceeding the capabilities of the Snapdragon 845 and Kirin 970 on paper, but likely something to be tested in practice. The Exynos 9810 modem also is the first one to employ 256-QAM in the uplink and thus achieving up to 200Mbps speeds as a UE Category 18 in the uplink as well.
As is usual with new flagship Exynos announcements the SoC is likely already in mass production and waiting to be used in the new Galaxy S9 series which in turn will be expected in the MWC timeframe at the end of February.
Source: Samsung Newsroom
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jjj - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
The danger with Spectre (and this is gonna sound way crazy and it is but nowadays it's possible), is that it might change how folks look at security and some vendors might end up accepting higher security/privacy risks in consumer to gain some perf, lower costs and faster time to market.. They can even charge extra for "more secure" SKUs- to some degree they already do that.Modern software collects most data anyway so some hardware folks might decide that only some data has to remain sacred but most of it can be freely available. Yeah it does sound nuts and it is really bad but most of the data is already compromised by software so it's pointless to secure the hardware.
skavi - Wednesday, January 3, 2018 - link
Dang, they're leapfrogging Qualcomm in terms of cache. Twice the big L2 and twice the L3 compared to the 845.lilmoe - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
Samsung needs to completely ditch Qualcomm and go fully vertical, at least for their S and Note series. They've been held back for a while. Just do it and worry about the lawsuits later... Or just pay up for the necessary licensing in the US and China.tuxRoller - Friday, January 5, 2018 - link
Held back?Did you read the AT article comparing 835 & the 8895?
lilmoe - Friday, January 5, 2018 - link
Ah, yes, benchmark scores, testing workstation workloads, at constant max clock speeds, on a smartphone SoC. Cool story.People are too lazy/stubborn to change how they think about "performance", let alone efficiency. But I guess the current methods are fine for publications. They generated adequate hits and clicks, for cheap. I'll leave it to someone who has the time and means to make practical/meaningful comparisons. Before, Anandtech had really great articles, in which the trained eye could discern the metrics that truly matter. Not anymore... Oh well.
Anyway, Exynos has been consistently faster, more efficient and (more importantly) more "feature rich" than Snapdragons for years in real world applications. Exynos is simply superior in image, audio and video processing. The photos and videos taken using the international variant have always been better. The media encoder/decoder has been the industry's gold standard since the Hummingbird.
As an example. Samsung's SoCs have had 4K120p HEVC encode/decode since the last iteration (8895 on the S8) and 4k60p since the 8890 (S7) almost 2 years ago (They added 10bit this year). Snapdragons are getting 4k60p just now with the 845. Other than the FPS, this tells me that the Exynos will be significantly more efficient in recording video at 4k60p compared with the Snapdragon. It wouldn't be "fair" for US/Chinese customers if the international variant had better features. The Exynos version can clock higher, but they still clock it conservatively to maintain "benchmarking parity"... So yea, they've been held back, by both Qualcomm on the hardware side and Google on the software side. This isn't anything new, we've been saying this for years.
StrangerGuy - Saturday, January 6, 2018 - link
Exynos is all around better than SD835, and shockingly even in radio performance according to some Chinese guys with an industrial RF tester.Santoval - Friday, January 12, 2018 - link
I do not necessarily subscribe to the "held back" theory, but you do realize that when they release the same phone globally with two distinct SoCs they need to roughly match their performance, right?Arnulf - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
There are no "ISO-power" and "ISO-performance". There are "iso-power" and "iso-performance" and neither have anything to do with the International Organization for Standardization.MrSpadge - Thursday, January 4, 2018 - link
"Iso" in this context means the latin word for "same", as often used in science. I don't think the article implies anywhere it would mean "International Organization for Standardization".phoenix_rizzen - Friday, January 5, 2018 - link
I believe the complaint is over the capitalisation of ISO- in a previous version of the article.In the current version of the article, there's still a type (isi-power), but at least it's all in lower-case now.