Samsung’s Exynos 9610 chip brings Galaxy S9-quality graphics to the midrange

(Image credit: Android Central)

Normally, there’s not much to get excited about with midrange chipsets. But Samsung’s new Exynos 9610 begs to differ.

The newly announced 10nm chipset is primed for high-performance activities that are usually found in flagship devices, such as recording in slow motion at up to 480fps (frames per second) at up to Full HD (1080p) and 120fps at a clean 4K resolution. This is quite impressive, as the Samsung Galaxy S9 can manage 960fps at 720p, so it's really not far off what the Exynos 9810 handles in terms of image processing.

The Samsung Exynos 9610 also brings along some features that promise to inject more smarts than expected into your midrange phone’s camera. It utilizes a neural network engine that lends a hand with tasks like facial detection, and allowing for sharp portraits even if you’re shooting with a single rear-facing lens.

In terms of what you can expect on a raw performance basis, Samsung’s latest is an octa-core offering made up of four fast Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.3GHz and four Cortex A53 cores running at 1.6GHz. Curiously, the GPU is the same one that you’ll find inside of the Exynos 9810 powering the Samsung Galaxy S9 in some regions, the Mali G72, as Android Central notes.

When will appear in phones?

Samsung has shared that mass production on the Exynos 9610 is set to take off in late 2018, so it’s a toss up at this point as to whether we’ll see it debut in a smartphone this year.

Given the company’s growing reach into the midrange smartphone market, it’s likely that once it launches in one of its phones – possibly next year’s version of the Samsung Galaxy A8 or Samsung Galaxy A3 – we’ll see it crop up in its other affordable phone ranges and, perhaps, tablets as well.

We’ll have to reserve judgment until we try it ourselves, but if the Exynos 9610 delivers on these truly exciting specs, it could be the most capable midrange chip ever made.

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