Samsung releases new Exynos 850 SoC for low-cost smartphones
Last week, Samsung unveiled a new 5G-ready mid-range SoC in the form of the Exynos 880. The chip has already made its debut alongside the Vivo Y70, and we can expect to see it on some upcoming Samsung mid-rangers. Samsung has now unveiled another 8nm SoC intended for low-cost devices.
Samsung's newest Exynos 850 SoC consists of eight ARM Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 2.0GHz and a Mali G-52 GPU. The lack of high-performance Cortex-A 7x series cores is hardly surprising, considering that the chip is intended for budget phones. Unlike the Exynos 880, this chip does not come with a 5G modem. Instead, it settles for Cat.7 and Cat.13 modules for the upload and download. They offer speeds of up to 300Mb/s and 390Mb/s, respectively.
The Exynos 850 chip can support displays with up to FHD+(2520x1080) resolution. It is compatible with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, along with GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo. There is no support for UFS storage and LPDDR5 RAM, and users have to settle for eMMC 5.1 and LPDDR4. Lastly, the Exynos 850's image processing unit can handle a single 21MP camera or a 16+5MP dual-camera configurations coupled with a 21MP front-facing camera. Video recording is limited to 1080p 30fps.
Samsung says that the Exynos 850 is 'Designed for mobiles, wearables and the IoT.' It is unclear as to when the chip will make its debut or if it will be a Samsung device. We can expect to see it in an upcoming Galaxy A or M series smartphone.