A closer look at the Galaxy S6’s Exynos 7420 SoC

As was expected, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is another industry leading flagship smartphone, packing in some of the latest and greatest pieces of mobile tech. This time though, Samsung has opted to exclusively use its in-house Exynos 7420 SoC, rather than a Qualcomm processor as it has done in previous years. So, let’s delve into the specifics to see why Samsung has so much confidence in its latest SoC.

One of the Exynos 7420’s big talking points has been the move down to a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, which puts Samsung ahead of Qualcomm’s 20nm Snapdragon 810. When it comes to manufacturing size, smaller numbers are better, as shorter transistor distances consume less energy and boost processing speeds. However, smaller, closely packed transistors can lead to current leakage between parts of the chip, an issue that FinFET manufacturing addresses by enclosing the conducting channel in a thin silicon “fin”.
For the same processor design, lower power consumption means more heat headroom for increasing clock speeds or additional battery savings, which will help explain some of the capabilities of Samsung’s chip as we dive down deeper.
The bulk of the Exynos 7420’s processing components are rather familiar. It is built from ARM’s reference Cortex-A57 and A53 CPU cores and its Mali-T760 GPU technology. At a quick glance, the design is very similar to the Galaxy Note 4’s Exynos 5433 chip.

Samsung is using ARM’s high-end octa-core Cortex-A57 and A53 big.LITTLE configuration for an efficient balance between peak performance, using the Cortex-A57s, and energy efficiency, by delegating background tasks to the low power Cortex-A53s. Samsung has again implemented Global Task Scheduling with this chip, which enables the use of eight cores at the same time, as well as dynamic core voltage and frequency switching.

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