Samsung unveiled a new powerful SoC today dubbed the Exynos 990 SoC, this SoC will be powering the next generation of Samsung’s flagship phones, like the Galaxy S11 and the Galaxy Note series. Not only this SoC was revealed, Samsung also went ahead to launch the Exynos 5123 5G which will be used when producing 5G phones in the future.
The Exynos 990 SoC and the Exynos 5123 5G is laying on a 7nm technology process with the use of an ultra-violet commonly known as EUV, what this means is that the SoC will be really powerful and power efficient. The Exynos 990 is the successor of the Exynos 9825 which is currently powering the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10.
The Exynos 990 SoC will be 20% faster than the previous Exynos 9825 and the Exynos 9820 because Samsung incorporated their custom CPU architecture in the form of 2 new Exynos M5 units. The other cores of the CPU include 2 Cortex-A76, an upgrade from previous gen’s Cortext A-75, and another 4 Cortext A-55 low-efficiency cores. In short, it is an Octa core processor which is faster than the previous Gen.
The SoC comes with the new neural processing unit(NPU) and digital signal processor which can perform over ten-trillion(TOPs) operations per second. Also, the new image signal processor(ISP) on-board supports up to 108MP sensor can record 8K 10-bit videos at 30fps. The one that i love most is that the SoC supports 120Hz refresh rate and that means the upcoming or feature flagship Samsung phones will have a 120Hz refresh rate screen, wait? that means the Samsung Galaxy S11 might come with a 120Hz refresh rate.
In terms of GPU, it comes with the all new Mali-G77 with M11 configuration based on Valhall architecture which Samsung claims to be 20% more powerful and power-efficient than its predecessor. The Exynos 5123 5G modem supports all the mobile networks including sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrums of 5G, 4G LTE, HSPA, TD-SCDMA, 3G WCDMA, and 2G GSM/CDMA.
In 4G, it can attain a peak downlink speed of 3.0Gbps by using higher-order 1024 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation(QAM) while on 5G it can utilize up to 8-carrier aggregation(8CA) method to achieve a peak downlink speed of 5.1 gigabits per second(Gbps) in sub-6GHz and 7.35 gigabits per second(Gbps) in mmWave.
Samsung said that the new SoC will start mass production starting from next year, we expect the Samsung Galaxy S11 to be shipped with this SoC.