Samsung reveals the Exynos 990 SoC

Samsung announced the company's new SoC, the Exynos 990, alongside the new 5G Exynos Modem 5123. Both are planned to be used, in 2020, with the Samsung Galaxy S11 and other devices from the company.

At Samsung Tech Day, the company showed the upcoming flagship chipset, the Exynos 990. The SoC is manufactured using the 7nm EUV, the same that's used to produce the Exynos 9825 from Galaxy Note 10, and the recently announced Exynos 980.

The new Exynos SoC has improved graphic performance or power efficiency by as much as 20% when compared to the Exynos 9820. This improvement comes from the usage of the new Mali G77 iGPU, the first GPU based on the Valhall architecture. There's another 20% improvement in performance for the CPU when comparing the Exynos M5 from the Exynos 990 to the Exynos M4 from its predecessor.

The chipset also supports refresh rates of up to 120Hz, the upcoming LPDDR5 memory, with frequencies as high as 2750MHz. Regarding the camera capabilities, it supports up to 6 image sensors “with concurrent processing of three” with a 108-megapixel resolution, due to the ISP (image signal processor).

In terms of CPU, the new Exynos comes in a tri-cluster design –  two Cortex-A76 cores, four Cortex-A55 cores, and “two powerful custom cores.” There's also an NPU (neural processing unit), in a dual-core design, used to handle the AI tasks, meaning that AI operations will be much faster since they won't need to go through a network and be processed by a server.

As mentioned, Samsung has revealed the new 5G modem, the Exynos Modem 5123. This modem uses the same 7nm EUV node processing from the other Exynos products. It was created to support “virtually all networks,” from as high as 5G's sub-6GHz to 2G GSM/CDMA. In a sub-6GHz 5G network, this modem can handle download speeds up to 5.1Gbps with 8-carrier aggregation, and 7.35Gbps in mmWave. In 4G networks, it can “only” reach 3Gbps using 1024 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM).

Both Exynos 990 SoC and Exynos Modem 5123 will begin to be mass-produced by the end of 2019.

KitGuru says: This information reveals a bit of what's to be expected from the new line-up that Samsung is bringing to customers. In 2020, when the Galaxy S11 launches, we will see how powerful this new chip is. Are you curious about Exynos' 990 performance?

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