Samsung today announced the launch of its new mobile processor, the Exynos 7 Series 9610. The Exynos 9610 chip is built on Samsung's 10-nanometer FinFET process and it will bring premium multimedia features to mid-range devices.
Samsung's Exynos 7 series chips are primarily used for its premium mid-range lineup such as the Galaxy A series while its Exynos 9 series chips are meant for flagships like the Galaxy S9. Aside from delivering enhanced multimedia features, the Exynos 9610 will also deliver added power and speed.
Exynos 9610 specs and features
The Exynos 7 Series 9610 chip is the successor to the Exynos 7 Series 7885 which Samsung has used in the Galaxy A8 and Galaxy A8+ (2018). We were quite impressed with that chip as it's arguably the best feature of Samsung's new premium mid-range lineup.
So the Exynos 9610 has big shoes to fill and it does that on paper, and then some. The CPU is made up of four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.3GHz and four 1.6GHz Cortex-A53 cores mated to a second-generation Bifrost-based ARM Mali-G72 graphics processor. There's also an embedded Cortex-M4F-based low-power sensor hub to power Always-on solutions, it manages the sensors in real-time without having to wake up the main processor.
It's no slouch in the connectivity department as well. Samsung's new processor has an embedded all-network LTE modem with Cat.12 3CA support for 600 Mbps downlink and Cat.13 2CA for 150 Mbps uplink. It also features 802.11ac 2×2 MIMI Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and FM radio.
Now on to the promised premium multimedia features. The Exynos 9610 has deep learning-based image processing and enhanced slow motion video recording. It couples vision and image processing with a neural network engine for improved face detection, single camera out-focusing (bokeh with a single camera) and improved low-light performance.
Samsung has really embraced slow motion video recording this year with the Galaxy S9. Its new flagship comes with the Super-slow motion feature which lets users record short clips at a whopping 960 frames per second in 720p resolution. It's made possible by Samsung's brilliant new three-stack image sensor that will soon be available for other devices as well.
The Exynos 9610 will significantly improve slow motion video recording on the company's premium mid-range handsets. It has support for slow motion video recording at 480fps in full HD resolution. The chip is able to encode slow motion video even with a traditional two-stack image sensor courtesy of its image signal processor which brings a 1.6x improvement in performance. Moreover, the Exynos 9610 utilizes a premium multi-format codec to encode and decode up to 4K 120fps video.
Samsung says that the Exynos 9610 is going to be mass produced in the second half of this year which means that the Galaxy A8 (2018)'s successor due early next year will most certainly be powered by it.
