At the MWC 2017, the three major chipmakers have all peddled their latest wares – MediaTek offers the deca-core Helio X30, Qualcomm offers the quite popular Snapdragon 835, and Samsung the Exynos 9 8895. All of these are made with the new 10 nanometer process, but it’s the Korean company that suffers from a lack of market knowledge about its product. This is why Samsung is aiming to put the Exynos 9 chips in standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets.
Samsung already produces and markets a smartphone-powered, tethered VR headset in the Samsung Gear VR. But at MWC 2017, Samsung was reportedly showing off untethered VR headsets to highlight the Exynos 9 8895 chip’s VR qualities. The Exynos 8895 is octa-core – four of those custom built by Samsung and four of them Cortex-A53 cores – ably supported by ARM’s Mali G71 GPUs with 20 cores.
The VR leverage is that this chip has its own vision processing unit for VR processes, which can handle motion detection and track head movement independent of the other processors. This is why Samsung is pushing the chip for untethered VR headsets – because with the evidence supplied, the Exynos 8895 can surely power a VR device on its own.
As per usual, Samsung will be using the Exynos 8895 for its international Galaxy S8 variants, while using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 for US units, mainly due to US network restrictions.
VIA: PC World
