Samsung Exynos 5 Series 7872 SoC With Bluetooth 5.0, Iris Sensor Launched

Samsung has announced the new Exynos 5 7872 SoC that will power some of the upcoming mid-range smartphones in 2018. The new SoC is part of the mid-range Exynos 5 series. The first smartphone to be equipped with an Exynos 5 7872 SOC is the Meizu M6s, which was launched on Wednesday. The launch was not the first time Samsung had partnered with Meizu, with the Chinese smartphone manufacturer launching the Meizu Pro 6 Plus with a Exynos 8890 SoC in 2016, apart from the Meizu Pro 5 in 2015 with a Samsung Exynos 7420 SoC,

Built on a 14nm FinFET process the Exynos 5 7872 features a hexa-core CPU consisting two Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. Samsung claims the single core performance has been increased by two folds when compared to its predecessor. With the new SoC, Samsung has stated the desire to bring mid-range smartphones closer to the premium end of the Android smartphone spectrum. Samsung has listed out the specifications of the Exynos 5 series 7872 SoC on its own official blog.

As mentioned, the Exynos 7872 SoC contains six cores: two Cortex-A73 CPUs clocked at 2GHz and four Cortex-A53 CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz. Additionally, it comes with a Mali-G71MP1 graphics processing unit and an LTE Cat.7 modem with 300Mbps download and 150Mbps upload speeds. A major USP of the Exynos 7872 SoC is that Samsung has added support for an iris scanner camera sensor. This essentially means that we can expect mid-range handsets feature this security feature soon.

Samsung has not introduced any special provisions for a dual-camera support but the SoC does come with support for 21.7-megapixel front and rear cameras. The Exynos 7872 also features an improved Image Signal Processor and Multi-Format Codec. It is the ISP that enables smartphones to feature an iris camera sensor up to 8MP. It also embeds a hardware block for Smart WDR (Wide Dynamic Range) that generates a WDR image with just a single shot, Samsung says. The SoC does not have 2160p video capturing capability, but smartphones powered by Exynos 5 will be capable of full HD 120fps encoding and decoding. Meanwhile, the maximum screen resolution is 1,920x1,200 pixels.

Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11n dual-band, Bluetooth 5.0, CDMA, GSM, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA, LTE-FDD, and LTE-TDD. Meanwhile, sensors include GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo. Storage and memory options include LPDDR3 for RAM, eMMC 5.1 for built-in storage and the SD 3.0 standard for expandable memory.

Apart from Meizu, which has several other Exynos-powered smartphones, Samsung has sold its Exynos processors to other OEMs as well, including Lenovo, which used them in its LePhone K860i and LePhone K860 smartphones.