With the release of Galaxy S6, Samsung was able to get rid of the traditional plastic exterior it had observed for several of its previous handsets and incorporated a premium one. In addition, the South Korean tech firm was also able to assimilate one of the fastest chips in the handset, Exynos 7420. Thanks to the latest teardown carried out by Chipworks, it has now been revealed that the company's latest SoC happens to be extremely small in terms of die size.
According to the website, there are several components present inside the device that carry Samsung's brand name. This will range from the LPDDR4 memory, to the communication modem, all the way to Power Management ICs and an NFC controller. It appears that Samsung is shutting down partnerships with several tech firms in order to decrease their grip on the market share and for the tech giant to increase its domain on its own devices.
Before the unveiling of Galaxy S6, it was reported that Samsung refused to incorporate Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 SoC on the grounds that there were overheating and graphic driver issues stemming from Qualcomm's SoC. The American tech firm refuted these claims, stating that its flagship chipset was performing without suffering from the aforementioned issues. It was later revealed that Samsung's false claims were due to the fact that the smartphone giant wanted to terminate its partnership with the leading mobile chipset maker.
Coming back to the teardown, it is revealed that Exynos 7420 is indeed fabricated on the 14 nm FinFET process, allowing it to deliver unprecedented mobile processor performance coupled with impressive thermal and energy efficiency. What is even more interesting to see is that the company's Exynos 7420 measures just 78 mm2, which is much smaller compared to the Snapdragon 801's 118 m2 present in the Galaxy S5.
The smaller manufacturing process is mostly the primary contributor to the smaller die size.
