Samsung announces new 7nm mobile chipset Exynos 990 and 5G Exynos5123 modem

The 7nm Exynos 990 SoC is expected to make its debut in the Samsung Galaxy S11 smartphone coming in the first quarter of 2020

Samsung has unveiled a new flagship 7nm mobile processor Exynos 990 and the 5G Exynos 5123 modem at its Tech Day 2019 event in San Jose, California.

The new chipset is an incremental version to the Exynos 980 5G mobile chipset that Samsung announced last month, and is expected to be incorporated in the Samsung Galaxy S11 smartphone, coming in the first quarter of 2020.

Like Huawei's Kirin 990 5G chipset, the Exynos 990 is also based on a 7nm manufacturing process. It features eight cores in a 2+2+4 tri-cluster CPU configuration, bringing a 20 per cent performance boost compared t othe Exynos 980, according to Samsung.

Of the eight cores, two are Samsung's custom processor cores, two are ARM Cortex A76 cores and the remaining four are lower-power ARM A55 cores for low-priority tasks.

The Exynos 990 is equipped with an embedded ARM Mali-G77 GPU. It comes with a dual-core neural processing unit (NPU) - a co-processor intended to support AI, and an enhanced digital signal processor (DSP) to improve camera performance, according to Samsung. The new processor can support a maximum of six cameras with resolutions up to 108MP (but only three at once at this resolution).

A major change that Exynos 990 brings is the shift from LPDDR4X to LPDDR5 memory support, enabling the new processor to increase the memory controller frequency from 2,093 MHz to 2,750MHz.

The South Korean electronics giant also unveiled the 5G Exynos 5123 modem on Wednesday. The new modem is one of the first to be created using a 7nm extreme ultra-violet (EUV) process.

Exynos 5123 can provide download speeds of up to 7.35 Gbps in mmWave and 5.1 Gbps in a sub-6GHz setting, putting it in the same league as Snapdragon X55 5G modem. In 4G networks, it can provide downlink speed of up to 3Gbps.

Both the Exynos 990 and Exynos Modem 5123 will go into mass production by the end of this year.

"Samsung's Exynos 990 and Exynos Modem 5123 are perfectly adapted for high-volume 5G and AI applications, and are designed to help the world's most ambitious enterprises, large and small, achieve their goals of bringing new capabilities to their markets," said Inyup Kang, president of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics.

Analysts expect Exynos 990 to compete with the Huawei Kirin 990, Apple's A13 Bionic, and Qualcomm's next flagship Snapdragon processor.

The Exynos 990 is expected to debut in the Samsung Galaxy S11 that is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2020.