Lenovo May Launch Samsung's Exynos 8870 SoC Based Device in 2016: Report

Following reports from earlier this month about Samsung making a new SoC for third-party manufacturers, Lenovo is now reported to be planning to use Samsung's yet-to-be-launched Exynos 8870 processor in one of its devices.

The news comes from a China-based source who claims that Lenovo is one of the new clients of the Samsung's upcoming chipset. There are no further details about the unknown Lenovo device packing the Eynos 8870 SoC.

A recent report had tipped that Meizu's flagship Pro 6 may also pack Samsung's unannounced Exynos 8870 processor. Details of the Samsung's Exynos 8870 are scarce at the moment but it is likely to be a less powerful variant of the high-end Exynos 8 Octa 8890 system-on-chip (SoC), which was set to go into mass production by late 2015. Meizu was also said to the first handset maker to utilise the new Exynos 8870 processor in its next flagship smartphone, the Meizu Pro 6. This however seems to be untrue as Lenovo has started making waves to use the chipset. For those unaware, Meizu had launched its flagship smartphone, the Pro 5, earlier this year sporting the Samsung Exynos 7420 octa-core processor.

To recall, Samsung's already unveiled Exynos 8890 premium processor has been built on 14nm FinFET fabrication process and features the company's first custom-designed CPU based on 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. The South Korean company at launch had claimed that its new processor provided up to 30 percent improvement in performance and up to 10 percent in power efficiency compared to the previous generation Exynos 7 Octa. The new Exynos 8 Octa comes with an LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem that allows maximum download speeds of up to 600Mbps (Cat.12) and upload speeds of up to 150Mbps (Cat.13) with carrier aggregation.

Based on previous leaks, Meizu and Lenovo may not be the only handset makers considering using an Exynos chipset. A new BlackBerry smartphone was spotted in GFXBench listings tipping that the company may be testing use of Samsung's Exynos chips in its devices.