Samsung has officially unveiled the new Exynos 5 7872 SoC that will power some of the upcoming mid-range smartphones in 2018. The new SoC is part of the mid-range Exynos 5 series. The first smartphone that features the Exynos 5 7872 SOC is the Meizu M6s, which was launched on Wednesday.
The launch was not the first time Samsung had partnered with Meizu, Meizu launched their Pro 6 Plus with a Exynos 8890 SoC in 2016, apart from their Pro 5 in 2015 which featured a Samsung Exynos 7420 SoC.
Built on a 14nm FinFET process the Exynos 5 7872 features a hexa-core CPU consisting two Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. Samsung claims the single core performance has been doubled when compared to its predecessor. With the new SoC, Samsung is aiming to bring mid-range smartphones closer to the premium end of the Android smartphone spectrum.
The Exynos 7872 SoC contains six cores: two Cortex-A73 CPUs clocked at 2GHz and four Cortex-A53 CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz. Additionally, it comes with a Mali-G71MP1 graphics processing unit and an LTE Cat.7 modem with 300Mbps download and 150Mbps upload speeds. A major USP of the Exynos 7872 SoC is that Samsung has added support for an iris scanner camera sensor. This essentially means that we can expect mid-range handsets feature this security feature soon.
The Exynos 7872 also features an improved Image Signal Processor and Multi-Format Codec. It is the ISP that enables smartphones to feature an iris camera sensor up to 8MP. It also embeds a hardware block for Smart WDR (Wide Dynamic Range) that generates a WDR image with just a single shot, Samsung says. The SoC does not have 2160p video capturing capability, but smartphones powered by Exynos 5 will be capable of full HD 120fps encoding and decoding. Meanwhile, the maximum screen resolution is 1,920×1,200 pixels.
Storage and memory options include LPDDR3 for RAM, eMMC 5.1 for built-in storage and the SD 3.0 standard for expandable memory.
