Arguably the most high profile Mali powered device to hit the hands of customers this year is the Samsung Galaxy S7. Launched at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, the Galaxy S7 represents Samsung’s latest offering to the premium mobile market. Similar in design to the S6, the S7 and S7 Edge strike a balance of sleek elegance and super sturdiness. One of the key features Samsung are talking about is the fact that there is an efficiently water-proofed smartphone! For those of us with a tendency to drop our phones in sinks, puddles and who knows what else, this is pretty big news in itself!
For the graphics geeks among us though, the incredible graphics and clarity and depth of colour are a real attraction for Samsung’s latest offering. The chipset is the Exynos 8 Octa (8890) and features four CPU cores based on a 64-bit ARMv8 architecture. ARM’s big.LITTLE technology is utilized to its full advantage to strike the perfect balance between super high performance and premium power efficiency. The complex user interface and incredible graphics capability is powered by a Mali-T880MP12 GPU configuration, the most powerful Mali GPU on the market.
So why is Mali the GPU of choice to power high end devices? Simple, Mali’s the number 1 GPU in the world! Great leaps in energy efficiency come from the built in bandwidth saving technologies like ARM Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC), Smart Composition and Transaction elimination and make it the perfect choice for the latest high end devices. One of the reasons there’s such focus on performance and efficiency is the rise of the VR industry which is powering ahead at an unforeseen rate. Obviously VR requires fantastic graphics, when your eyes are just centimeters from a mobile screen the image needs to be spectacular, but another smart choice Samsung have made in this area is their display.
The AMOLED display works differently from a traditional LCD display in that each and every pixel is individually lit and adjusted by the amount of power travelling through the film behind it. This means that unlike LCD displays where there is a permanent backlight; Samsung’s AMOLED display allows you to completely turn off sections of the screen. Not only does this allow you to achieve a deeper, truer black than on an LCD display but it also means that in VR applications you can light only the part of the screen that is showing the correct view based on the user’s head position. This allows faster adjustment to the updated head positioning, lowering latency and providing a sharper, more immersive VR experience than is available on LCD displays. As Samsung are ahead of the VR game with the Oculus collaborated Samsung Gear VR headset, this is an important factor in staying ahead of the game.
With incredible Mali based visuals, superior battery life and a fantastic user interface, the Samsung S7 represents another step up for Android devices and we look forward to seeing what comes next.
