Chipworks Publishes Samsung Galaxy S6 Teardown
by Joshua Ho on April 3, 2015 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy S6
Recently, Chipworks managed to get their hands on the Galaxy S6 and tear down the device to get a closer look at the ICs (integrated circuit) present in the device, which allows for additional analysis of the device. We’re still working on our full review, but we can take a quick look at what Chipworks has found in the device.
This includes an Exynos 7420 SoC that we’ve previously discussed, a Shannon 333 modem along with a Shannon 928 Transceiver and Shannon 710 envelope tracker for the RF front-end. Interestingly, they’ve found an ST-Microelectronics touch controller, which seems to be for the display. Given that most of the Galaxy S and Note family uses Cypress’ CapSense solution for the capacitive touch keys, it’s likely that this is true for the Galaxy S6 as well. Interestingly enough, Chipworks has also identified a Samsung C2N8B6 companion ISP present in the Galaxy S6.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the teardown thus far is that the die size of the 14nm FinFET Exynos 7420 is about 78 mm^2, which is incredibly small compared to the 113 mm^2 size of the 20nm Exynos 5433. It’s unlikely that this is purely due to process as the metal interconnect pitch improvements are relatively minimal when compared to 20nm HKMG, so it’s likely that we’re looking at a great deal of optimization in layout and possibly some IP blocks removed in order to reduce die size. With a die shot floorplan we should be able to figure out exactly what Samsung did to achieve this, and get a good idea of what Samsung has done for the Exynos 7420 which should help with our full review of the Galaxy S6.
Source: Chipworks
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johnnohj - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
Samsung is rumored to be working on a SOC codenamed 'Mongoose' with custom cores (max clock @ 2.3 Ghz) + stock A53 cores in big.LITTLE configuration. Rumors are it has a single-core Geekbench score of 2200.http://www.gsmarena.com/next_samsung_exynos_to_pac...
http://www.sammobile.com/2015/03/18/samsung-expect...
Drumsticks - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
I second the "set the phone at 720p and test" notion! (I didnt even know that was possible!) it would be really nice to see what kind of battery life the device can get like that.extide - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
It's not possible to reduce the power usage of the screen though ... the screen still physically has the same amount of pixels...Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
I'll be taking a look at those things, but not for the incoming review. I still don't have the devices to test things on.lilmoe - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
Thanks.johnnohj - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link
Since the S6 is using a new touch controller, can we see a comparison of the display touch latency with other phones?And I wonder what the storage performance is like with full disk encryption.
Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link
The Note 4 used the same touch controller, don't expect any difference. And FDE is not enabled on Samsung devices.extide - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
FWIW, I have a Note4 and my work recently started requiring FDE, and I haven't really noticed a difference in performance between now and before when it was not encrypted. This is of course on Android 4.4.4 and a stock/not rooted Note 4.johnnohj - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s6/general/...According to the benchmarks in this post on XDA, there seems to be no noticeable impact on S6 performance after encryption.
I hope Samsung enables it by default on future devices.
coolhardware - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
If you want a top-quality camera, I do not think you will like the M9.The only thing lacking on the S6 is speaker quality IMHO. Which is a real bummer coming from the Nexus 6 (which I love the speakers on).
For me the camera on the S6 really takes it to the next level. Ordered the 128GB on Amazon and selling my Nexus 6 on eBay (I will really miss the speakers though).
No sales tax in my state and the 3% cashback, it especially brings the 32GB model to a nice price:
http://amzn.to/1P952Ui
Especially if you like to stream movies/media rather than storing them on device.
Lastly, Amazon is doing a $35 app credit with some of the phones which is rather interesting.