Samsung presents 5nm Exynos 2100-soc with 5G modem

Samsung has announced its Exyos 2100 soc. The chip for smartphones has an integrated 5G modem with support for high and low frequencies. Samsung makes the soc on its 5nm process with euv and no longer uses its own designed cores.

The CPU cores of the Samsung Exynos 2100-soc are comparable to those of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888. Both manufacturers use one Arm Cortex-X1 core, three A78 cores and four A55 cores, but according to the specifications specified by the manufacturers, Samsung clocks are higher. Samsung also says that Arm has optimized the Cortex-X1 core for Samsung, without giving any further details.

Samsung no longer uses its own Mongoose cores in its socs. That was still the case with the Exynos 990 in the Samsung S20 series. That Exynos soc underperformed its Snapdragon 865 counterpart. Samsung wants to catch up with the new soc.

There are differences with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888-soc. For example, Samsung uses an Arm Mali-G78 GPU with 14 cores, while Qualcomm has a modified GPU design. The neural processing unit of both socs is equal on paper, with 25Tops of computing power for artificial intelligence.

Both socs have an image signal processor that can process images from a 200-megapixel camera. Samsung’s Exynos 2100 supports up to six camera sensors, four of which can be used simultaneously. The soc can also encode 4k120 videos and decode 8k60 videos.

Samsung makes the Exynos 2100 on its own 5nm process with euv. The manufacturer says that a performance gain of 10 percent yields with 20 percent less consumption. According to Samsung figures, the Exynos 2100 is 19 and 33 percent faster in benchmarks than the Exynos 990, in single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.

Like the Snapdragon 888, the Exynos 2100 has an integrated 5G modem with support for both sub-6GHz frequencies and high mmWave frequencies. Samsung mentions a maximum download speed of 7.35Gbit/s on mmWave and 5.1Gbit/s on sub-6GHz networks. The modem therefore seems to have the same properties as those in the Snapdragon 888-soc.

The Exynos 2100 will find its way into high-end smartphones from Samsung. The first devices to receive the soc are the Samsung Galaxy S21 models. That has not yet been officially announced, but almost all information about those phones has already leaked. Samsung will officially announce the S21 series on Thursday.

Samsung Exynos 2100 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 888