Galaxy S8’s blazing new processor detailed

The Galaxy S8 is expected to make its market debut sometime in April. Rumors suggest some models will pack Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor while others will employ Samsung’s brand new 10nm Exynos 8895 chip. New details on the latter were recently published by SamMobile.

The site cited a slide published on Twitter that suggests Samsung has two iterations of the Exynos 8895 planned, including the 8895M and the 8895V. The higher-end 8895M appears to sport four 2.5GHz and four 1.7GHz cores while the 8895V offers four 2.3GHz Exynos M2 and four 1.7Ghz Cortex A53 cores.

My friend ,whose weibo ID is”Grass Digital”,shows Exynos 8895 . pic.twitter.com/YgHMeVHTEN

— 萌萌的电教 (@mmddj_china) December 28, 2016

Most users might not recognize the difference between the two, at least when it comes to raw power for stuff like gaming and video processing, so we’re not quite sure what the need for two different processors is. Perhaps that boils down to the GPU; the Exynos 8895M has a 20-core processor while the Exynos 8895V has 18 cores, according to the sheet above.

Why so many Galaxy S8 processors?

My guess is that some markets, perhaps for reasons related to the modem, will receive the 8895V while others will get the 8895M. Or maybe Samsung will split the processors between the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Edge, leaving the hair of additional processing power to run the slightly larger display on the latter. In any case, most folks in the U.S. will probably see the Snapdragon 835 version, nullifying any potential worry that you’ll end up with a slightly slower processor than the kid next door.