Samsung has officially unveiled the Exynos 8890, its latest and greatest chipset that is expected to power the two variants of Galaxy S7 scheduled for release in 2016.

The Exynos 8890 is a 64-bit, octa-core chipset and is the second high-end processor from Samsung manufactured using 14 nm FinFET technology after the Exynos 7420 running on the premium line of Galaxy S6 smartphones. This means the distance between the chip's components is only 14 nm, allowing it to deliver greater performance while increasing energy efficiency.

It is also the first Samsung chip to come with custom cores. Four are based on the ARMv8 architecture, while the other four are Cortex-A53 cores. The former are designed to take on the heavy workload to power resource-intensive activities, and the latter work in tandem with the custom cores to increase efficiency. This makes the Exynos 8890 30 percent faster and 10 percent more power efficient than its predecessor, says Samsung.

"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," says Dr. Kyushik Hong, vice president of marketing at Samsung's System LSI.

Graphics is also expected to deliver a punch, with ARM's newest Mali-T880 coming with support for 4K as well as double-digit improvements in performance and efficiency.

Most interestingly, however, is the integration of the modem into the chipset. This is not the first time Samsung did such a thing, but this is the first top-of-the-line chip to come from the company with integrated LTE Cat. 12/13. The modem has support for lightning-fast data speeds of 600 Mbps, at least in theory. In real life, however, users will have to find ISPs who can actually provide data at such speeds.

Samsung says the Exynos 8890 is all set for mass production by the end of 2015. However, a report coming out of South Korea says Samsung's System LSI Business Development unit has already begun production of the new chipset this week, a full month earlier than the expected December 2015 start of production. This is apparently linked to the rumored January 2016 official unveiling of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, followed by its release to retail stores a month later.

The Exynos 8890 is expected to power half of Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones sold internationally, while the recently unveiled Snapdragon 820 from Qualcomm is expected to run under the hood of the models that will be sold in the U.S.