Samsung announced a major upgrade to their budget SoC offering today, which will go by the name Exynos 7570. It will be the first of its kind—targeted to IoT devices and lower market smartphones—to be built on the power efficient 14nm FinFET process. Also noteworthy is that this new model will have built-in connectivity hardware for WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS rather than relying on third-party vendors to provide those components for end user devices.

This SoC won't be making an appearance in your Galaxy S8 next year, but is suited to the cheapest cell phones and most appropriately the connected devices that don't need so much processing and video rendering capacity.

As noted by the good folks at AnandTech, this comes as a surprise to market observers because it had long been thought that the manufacturing cost for a 14nm process would be too high to use in mid-range SoCs, let alone budget ones. The benefits of going to 14nm from the 7570's predecessor's 28nm process size are both that more processing power can be packed into the same physical space but also less battery drain. Samsung estimates a 70% performance improvement along with a 30% gain in energy efficiency.

And while previous budget SoCs from Samsung have had integrated modems, they have not had built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS (GNSS) connectivity like the 7570 does. Having smaller components helps but shifts in the industry also likely explain Samsung including their own implementation.

The 7570 will have four A53 cores, but Samsung hasn't told us the clock speed just yet. Likewise, there's no word on the GPU but the fact that it will not support resolutions higher than 1280x800 indicates that it won't be very powerful.

It's not the sexiest product announcement, but having capable hardware available at low prices is good for everyone.

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Source: Samsung Newsroom