Samsung's new Exynos 7872 brings class to the budget segment

While the upcoming S9 and S9+ may be the major Samsung releases on the radar, the South Korean company has gone ahead to create an SoC that could be one of the most competitive this year, in the form of the Exynos 7872. The SoC was a released a few days ago, and it looks quite spectacular, as we haven't seen anything this interesting since the Snapdragon 660 that was released about a year ago.

The Exynos 7872 is a budget SoC, as it belongs to Samsung's "Exynos 5" series. It, for example, will see its first use on the Meizu M6s, a device with an MSRP under US$200. That considered, what Samsung managed to do with it is praise-worthy, as is it beats out Qualcomm's Snapdragon 4XX series handily. The SoC, deviating from the octa-core trend, only features six cores, making it a hexacore chipset. Interestingly, it uses four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.6 GHz, and two powerful Cortex-A73 clocked at 2.0 GHz. That's particularly impressive, as SoCs in its segment are yet to implement Cortex-A73 cores.

On the graphics side of things, it features the last-gen single-core Mali G71 GPU. This GPU is much less impressive, as it just about competes with the Mali T880 MP4. That is still better than the Adreno 506 on the Snapdragon 625, though, and will handle graphical tasks well.

The Exynos 7872 is built on a 14nm manufacturing process, which is the recommended minimum these days. While it handles performance well, it's still a budget processor and that shows in other departments, as it only supports a display of 1900x1200, which isn't enough for an 18:9 FHD+ panel. On the memory side, the SoC only supports eMMC 5.1 for storage and LPDDR3 for RAM, both of which aren't overly laudable. It does support Dual-Band Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 5.0, and Full HD 120fps encoding both with H.265 and H.264. It also doesn’t cater directly for dual rear cameras, as its ISP supports only up to 21.7 MP sensors on both the front and rear.

In terms of performance, the Exynos sits alongside the Snapdragon 630, and that is impressive considering the fact that it will be used on much cheaper devices, as it is Samsung’s entry-level chipset.