Towards the end of last week, it emerged that a top Samsung official was working together with other company competitors looking to get hold of the South Korean tech giant’s top secrets.
The official was arrested for trying to steal details related to Samsung’s 10nm and 14nm technology used in making smartphone chipsets. The 14nm process has been outsourced by a number of companies, but it seems Samsung wants to get the better of them with a new 10nm process. This technology will reportedly be used to make the Exynos 8895 SoC that is set to feature on the Galaxy S8, a phone that should come out next year.
The Exynos 8895 will succeed this year’s Exynos 8890, which has already been used in this year’s Samsung Galaxy flagships, including the disastrous Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The reports claim that the 2017 Samsung Galaxy S8 will pair this processor with a Mali-G71 GPU, a unit that is said to be 1.8x more powerful than the current Mali-T880 MP12 that is available on the Exynos 8890 SoC.
With VR set to take over the world of technology, it is also revealed that the new Exynos 8895 will be capable of high-end 4K and VR experiences thanks to the new Bifrost architecture being used by the GPU. It further adds compatibility with Vulkan, GPU Compute, Android RenderScript APIs as well as OpenGL ES 3.2. More rumors about the Galaxy S8 also point towards a 4K display unit to improve on the VR experience.
This is preliminary information, so don’t be too eager to see everything here appear on the Galaxy S8 when it is made official. However, one thing that you can perhaps be confident with it is a 3D Touch-like screen. Apparently, the tech giant has filed a patent that will see future smartphones come with pressure-sensitive technology on the screens. Whether this will begin with the Galaxy S8 and S8 Edge is still unknown. It is possible that Samsung could spare it for the Galaxy Note 8, but this can only be told with time.
Still, it is better to be cautious with how you treat this information, especially since Samsung has filed numerous patents before that never get to materialize. Samsung Galaxy S8 is expected to be launched in early 2017, especially after the Galaxy Note 7 disaster.