Samsung Electronics made two biggest stride ever in its catch-up drive to challenge mobile SoC market leader Qualcomm, taking up the heat in the competition for the market.

The underdog chip maker in the mobile SoC market today rolled out its first fully integrated octa-core mobile SoC solution that comes integrated an application processor and cellular modem baseband circuitry in a single silicon die.

Fabricated with Samsung's homegrown 14nm FinFETchip-making process, the octa core mobile SoC Exynos 8 Octa 8890 is also built with Samsung's first customized CPU cores.

The customized CPU processor cores are Samsung's home grown CPU core that was built with 64-bit ARMv8 architecture.

Mass rollout is scheduled to start in late 2015

“The Exynos 8 Octa is a leading-edge application processor for next-generation mobile devices that incorporates Samsung’s mobile technology leadership in CPU, ISP, and modem as well as process technology,” said Dr. Kyushik Hong, Vice President of System LSI marketing, Samsung Electronics. “With our custom designed CPU cores and the industry’s most advanced LTE modem, consumers using mobile devices with the Exynos 8 Octa will experience a new level of mobile computing."

The rollout of Exynos 8 Octa coincides with Qualcomm's release of Snapdragon 820 quad-core mobile SoC CPU , the latest of its Snapdragon series of mobile CPU, which comes integrated with Qualcomm's own homegrown CPU core Kryo.

The on-chip integration of modem baseband processor into the Exynos 8 Octa mobile SoC has significant implications, as it will give Samsung a much-needed chance to compete with Qualcomm head-on-head to challenge the chipmaker's supremacy in the mobile SoC market.

As time to market and ease of design matter the most in the smart phone and table PC vendors, they preferred one fully integrated chip solution of application processor and cellular baseband processor rather than buying separately purchasing and then taking pains to embed them into their board design for smart phones.

First customized CPU core based on ARMv8 architecture

Application processors are a sort of chips to process multiple applications like Web- surfing, user interfaces and game playing, and video renderings, for example. Cellular modem processors are circuitries chips that convert analog signals into digital, filter them and process communications protocols and algorithms .

Coming integrated with an application processor and LTE REl12.CAT 12/13 modem chip, the Exynos 8 Octa incorporates 8 cores - four ARM Cortex A-53 and its four customized cores in what's called ARM big. LITTLE circuitry layout scheme.

The big. Little system architecture is a combination of low-power cores and high performance core designed to optimize the power and performance budget. ARM Cortex- A53 is a low power CPU core. which processes power-thrift, light duty tasks. Meanwhile, Samsung's own customized core perform duty-heavy, power guzzling  tasks like Web page loading and Web surfing.

Compared with the previous Exynos 7 Octa application processor, for example, it offers 30% improvement in the performance and 10% gains in the power consumption

The LTE Rel.12 Cat.12/13 modem boasts of a peak data download speed of up to 600Mbps (Cat.12) and upload speed of up to 150Mbps (Cat.13) with carrier aggregation.

The Exynos 8 Octa also implements ARM's latest GPU core, Mali T880, performing graphic- intensive user interface, highly immersive 3D gaming and life-like virtual reality experiences.