Cortex-A72 powered Samsung Exynos 7650 and 7880 spotted

Samsung is preparing a couple of new chips for its Exynos line-up of mobile SoCs, if reports from China are to be believed. The new processors, named the Exynos 7650 and 7800, will apparently be built from high-end ARM parts, including the latest Cortex-A72 CPU core and Mali-T860 GPU.

Judging from the expected use of a 28nm manufacturing process, the Exynos 7650 and 7800 aren’t going to be top tier chips but could form the basis of Samsung’s next midrange line-up. Samsung has already used its more expensive 14nm FinFET process in this year’s Exynos 7420 for its flagship Galaxy S6 and Note 5 smartphones..

The Exynos 7650 appears to be the lower end of the two chips. It will feature a big.LITTLE paring of a Cortex-A72, ARM’s more power efficient high performance successor to the Cortex-A57, and its efficient Cortex-A53 for less demanding tasks. There’s also 993MHz LPDDR3 RAM with 14.9GB/s bandwidth and a three core Mali-T860 GPU, which ARM states is its best performing GPU for the lowest energy consumption.

The Exynos 7880 looks to be a slightly more high performance design, featuring a slight clock speed increase on the Cortex-A72, up to 1.8GHz from 1.7GHz, and faster 1066MHz LPDDR3 memory with a bandwidth of 17GB/s. Furthermore, the same ARM Mali-T860 GPU received an additional core for more graphics grunt.

We don’t know how many CPU cores will be included in either the two new SoCs, but we are quite likely looking at quad or hexa-core configurations due to the use of a 28nm process. Perhaps the 7880 will pack in additional cores to further separate itself from the 7650.

Most likely, these two reported chips are heading to mid-range Samsung Galaxy phones in 2016.