Samsung introduces Exynos 980-soc with integrated 5g modem
Samsung has announced its first Exynos soc with 5g connectivity. The Exynos 980 will get an integrated 5G modem for this. In addition, the neural processing unit for, among other things, AI-related tasks is built into the soc. It seems to be a midrange soc.
The Exynos 980 does not have a separate 5G modem, which should improve consumption and space within a device, Samsung says. The new integrated modem supports speeds of up to 2.55Gbit/s at 5G, provided the frequencies are lower than 6GHz. There is also support for Wi-Fi 6 and EN-DC, which combine 2cc lte and 5g to achieve a downlink speed of up to 3.55Gbit/s and an upload speed of 1.28Gbit/s. For 4g, Samsung has added a Category 15 modem with 5x carrier aggregation, leading to a download speed of 1Gbit/s and a Category 18 modem with 2x carrier aggregation for an upload speed of up to 200Mbit/s.
According to Samsung, the neural processing unit is able to deliver better performance by a factor of 2.7 compared to the predecessor. This component is integrated on the soc and therefore, according to the manufacturer, it is no longer necessary to forward calculations in this area to a server, which should also increase data protection and security. The npu would also enable improvements in applications such as user authentication, mixed reality and smart functions with the camera, but Samsung does not elaborate on that.
The soc features “two of the latest, best-performing Cortex-A77 cores and six efficient Cortex-A55 cores.” It concerns the 2.2GHz A77 and the 1.8GHz A55. Samsung combines this with the Mali-G76MP5 for graphical calculations and there is support for ufs 2.1 and lpddr4x. Furthermore, the image signal processor offers support for up to five sensors, resolutions up to 108 megapixels for a single camera or two cameras with a resolution of 20 megapixels each. There is support for 4K videos at 120 frames per second and HDR10+, with HEVC and VP9 supported.
Samsung makes the Exynos 980 on an 8nm finfet process and expects mass production to start by the end of this year. The company does not say anything about which devices will be the first to welcome the new soc. It seems to be a soc for midrange smartphones, given the fact that the GPU is less powerful than that of the Exynos 9820 soc in the Galaxy S10. The new soc also has no custom cores as in the high-end socs from Samsung.