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Samsung's next smartphone chip is ready for gigabit LTE

No guesses what smartphone you're likely to find this inside.

Samsung

Mobile World Congress is nearly upon us, giving Samsung ample reason to show off the latest product from its chip foundries. The company has announced the Exynos 9 Series 8895, a flagship CPU that's made with a 10-nanometer manufacturing process. The smaller circuits, it's hoped, will offer 27 percent better performance while drawing 40 percent less battery.

The 8895 ships with eight cores, four of which are Cortex A53s, paired with a quartet of Samsung's custom-designed variants. The company claims that it'll play back 4K video at 120fps as well as offering VR content at the same resolution. Security fans will also note that the 8895 comes with an additional processing unit designed to keep your fingerprint, iris and payment data securely locked away from prying eyes.

Additionally, the chip is Samsung's first to boast a gigabit LTE modem and support for five carrier aggregation. The hardware is expected to throughput data at 1Gbps and upload those Instagram selfies at a top speed of 150Mbps. That should keep your lust for high-capacity data networks at bay while those 5G networks are built out.

If history is any indication, it's more than likely that the Exynos 9 Series 9985 will sit at the heart of the forthcoming Galaxy S8. At least, it's the chip that'll be found inside the international version of the device -- since the US edition of the last few flagships used Qualcomm CPUs instead. We're likely to find out for sure in the run-up to the device's expected launch at the tail-end of March.