Samsung announced the commencement of mass-production of Exynos 7 series mobile SoCs, the first to be built on the company's swanky 14 nanometer FinFET silicon fabrication process. The chip will be formally launched in the run up to launch of Samsung's next-generation flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S6. Samsung now has the only active semiconductor fab, other than Intel, to get its silicon lithography down to 14 nm.

Unlike with some previous generations of Galaxy S-series devices, in which the company's homebrew Exynos family of chips drove non-LTE versions of the device, while Qualcomm Snapdragon chips were used to drive the LTE versions, Samsung could deploy Exynos 7 on both variants.

There are no performance figures on the Exynos 7 yet, but Samsung claims that with the 14 nm process, power consumption is down by 35 percent over the previous generation, and "productivity" is up by 30 percent. The Exynos 7 is expected to be a 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE chip, with enough horsepower to drive 1440p smartphones and 4K Ultra HD tablets.