Exynos 8890 Hardware Overview

In that location are two primary versions of the Galaxy S7 Edge in the wild: a primary version with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 inside, and a secondary version with a Samsung Exynos 8 Octa 8890 SoC inside. I received the Exynos 8890 version of the Galaxy S7 Edge to review, so this performance section will mostly focus on Samsung'due south silicon, but I'll give a quick overview of the Snapdragon 820 besides.

For nearly markets, including the United States, the Galaxy S7 Border will be sold with a Snapdragon 820 inside. This is Qualcomm's latest flagship SoC, packing four in-house-designed ARMv8 cores known every bit 'Kryo', split into ii 2-core clusters. The more powerful of these clusters is clocked at 2.ii GHz for high-operation tasks, while less intensive tasks will exist performed on the one.half dozen GHz cluster.

The Snapdragon 820 is also equipped with an Adreno 530 GPU clocked at 624 MHz, as well every bit a new Hexagon 680 DSP and support for HEVC decoding at 4K 60 FPS. The scrap is congenital using Samsung's 14nm FinFET procedure, and supports dual-channel LPDDR4 memory with 29.viii GB/s of bandwidth. The Snapdragon 820 besides includes back up for features like eMMC 5.1, LTE Cat 12/13, and Quick Charge three.0.

The telephone I take today for review, still, uses the new Exynos 8 Octa 8890 from Samsung. Also built using a 14nm process, the 8890 is essentially a directly competitor to the Snapdragon 820, with support for a like selection of features including LTE True cat 12/13 and LPDDR4 retention (at 28.7 GB/south).

The main differing factor hither is that Samsung has opted for an octa-core design rather than quad-core. It uses iv in-house-designed Exynos M1 'Mongoose' CPU cores clocked upward to 2.60 GHz, along with four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked up to 1.59 GHz, in a typical big.Lilliputian configuration with Global Task Scheduling.

Samsung hasn't released a whole lot of information about Exynos M1, just it'due south based on ARM's large core designs similar Cortex-A57 and A72. Samsung says we're looking at a 30% improvement in CPU operation over the Cortex-A57s included in the Exynos 7420 (seen in the Galaxy S6), along with 10% amend power efficiency.

Rather than using an ARM design, the M1 cores are connected to the smaller A53 cores through the utilise of a Samsung Coherent Interconnect, which is a custom variation of a cache-coherent interconnect.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (left) adjacent to a Galaxy S6

The GPU in the Exynos 8890 is an ARM Republic of mali-T880 MP12, which is a 12-cadre variant of their newest and nearly powerful 4th-generation 'Midgard' line. With an increase in ALU pipelines and cores compared to the Republic of mali-T760 in the Exynos 7420, we're looking at a decent pregnant graphics performance improvement over the Milky way S6. In the Galaxy S7 Border, the Mali-T880 is clocked at 650 MHz, which is a decrease in clock speed on the Exynos 7420.

Interestingly, Samsung has integrated a heatpipe cooling solution into the Galaxy S7 and S7 Border to help better dissipate heat from the SoC. This tends to signal that normally the Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 would run quite hot, so a heatpipe is needed to mitigate heat issues. It could as well mean nosotros're looking at college power consumption.

All Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge models come with 4 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage is the base level across the board. There is also a 64 GB model bachelor, although every bit both phones come with microSD card slots, there won't be huge need for models with higher internal storage. I tend to find 32 GB is fine for almost smartphones, especially if y'all're streaming music.

As is ordinarily the case, there are several versions of the Galaxy S7 Edge for different markets. The one I have on hand is the SM-G935F, which supports Category nine LTE for speeds of 450 Mbps downwardly and l Mbps up. The Exynos 8890 itself supports Category 12/thirteen LTE for 600 Mbps down and 150 Mbps up through what appears to be an integrated Shannon modem, though I doubtable this has only been enabled for markets that actually accept recent or impending Cat 12/13 rollouts.

Other connectivity features are exactly what you'd expect: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with 2x2 MIMO back up, Bluetooth 4.2 LE, ANT+, A-GPS+GLONASS, and NFC.