South Korean electronics company, Samsung today launched its premium mid-range Exynos 9610 SoC as a successor to the company's Exynos 7885 SoC, which was used on smartphones such as the Galaxy A8+. Going by the specifications of the newly introduced Exynos 9610 SoC, it's safe to assume that Samsung has done a great job and it's easily the powerful Samsung mid-range chip till date. Firstly, the Exynos 9610 SoC caters to Samsung's Exynos 7 series of mid-range chipsets and not the premium Exynos 9 lineup of SoCs. The Exynos 9610 SoC is built on the popular 10nm manufacturing process, which so far has been used to build the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series and Exynos 9 lineup.
It's great to see Samsung using the technology in mid-range chipsets. The Exynos 9610 SoC brings several updates to the table when compared to the previous Exynos 7885 SoC, especially in the camera and multimedia performance. The Exynos 9610 SoC brings a major boost in multimedia performance and the vision, image processing is now coupled with a neural network engine for better face detection and low-light images.
Samsung says that the advanced face detection feature enables the camera to recognise faces that are either not facing forward or partially covered with objects like hair or a hat. Also, there's a smart depth sensing tech, which captures excellent bokeh or out-focused portraits with a single camera. Samsung has also added various vision and image processing enhancements to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in pictures shot under low-light environments.
The best feature, in terms of the camera, is the Exynos 9610 SoC capability of recording slow-motion videos at 480fps. Samsung says the Exynos 9610 chipset uses a conventional two-stack image sensor, but it still capable of encoding slow-motion video, thanks to its image signal processor (ISP) with improved performance by 1.6 times and more-than-doubled mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) speed. In addition, the processor uses a premium multi-format codec (MFC) that allows encoding and decoding up to 4K 120fps.
The CPU of the Exynos 9610 SoC is comprised of four Cortex A73 cores running at 2.3GHz and four 1.6GHz Cortex A53 cores. And the company has added the second-generation Bifrost-based ARM Mali-G72. Overall, Samsung promises improved performance with the Exynos 9610 SoC.
Furthermore, the chipset also packs a dedicated Cortex-M4F-based low-power sensor hub which handles all the sensors in real-time without waking the main processor. That said, this new addition will help in speeding up the gesture recognition or context awareness processes as they will be processed in real-time.
Coming to the primary aspect, the Exynos 9610 SoC comes with Cat.12 LTE modem with 3CA support delivering downlink speeds of up to 600 Mbps and to handle the uplink speeds, the Cat.13 2CA modem comes into play which can deliver up to 150 Mbps speeds.
Other connectivity options in the chipset include 801.11ac 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, and FM for radio. In addition, for global location positioning coverage, it embeds a 4-mode Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver that includes GPS and GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo.
Samsung also confirmed that the new Exynos 9610 SoC would be mass produced in the second half of 2018 and maybe the Galaxy A9 series could be the first phones to feature the new chipset.
