Samsung’s Exynos 850 is an 8nm chip for budget Android smartphones

Samsung has been designing its own Exynos chipsets for several years now. The Korean smartphone maker normally uses both Qualcomm Snapdragon and Exynos processors for their flagship and upper mid-range devices, but they usually use their own in-house Exynos chips for their budget smartphones. Samsung has recently (and quietly) published a product page for a new entry in their Exynos lineup of processors: the Exynos 850.

This Exynos 850 processor can already be found in the recently-announced Samsung Galaxy A21s, a smartphone on the lower-end of Samsung’s Galaxy A lineup. Thus, we already expected this processor to be geared towards decidedly-budget smartphones. According to the specifications listed on the product page, the Exynos 850 has an octa-core CPU comprised of two clusters of ARM Cortex-A55 cores which are clocked at up to 2.0GHz. The SoC also features ARM’s Mali-G52 GPU. It also supports LPDDR4X RAM, eMMC 5.1 storage, Cat.7 LTE, Full HD+ (1080p) display panels, and more. The chipset is fabricated using Samsung’s fairly modern 8nm LPP process.

For imaging, the Exynos 850 apparently supports up to 1080p60 video recording, 21.7MP image processing from a single camera or 16MP + 5MP from dual cameras (presumably with ZSL), and encoding in HEVC/h.265.

As we said before, the Galaxy A21s is the first smartphone to sport this processor, and we know it has a 48MP quad rear camera setup, an HD+ Infinity-O panel, up to 6GB of RAM, and up to 64GB of storage, so we already knew those are things this processor supports. It is possible that we’ll see this SoC on other Samsung budget Android smartphones soon. Budget smartphones are improving at a surprising rate, and we can thank the incredible competition in markets like India and China for that.

h/t @kuma_sleepy