Samsung announces new 7nm Exynos 990 SoC for its flagship 2020 smartphones

Samsung is stepping up its efforts in the smartphone components game. The South Korean tech giant recently announced a new flagship chipset that could power its premium smartphones in 2020. The Exynos 990 is the latest addition to the company’s flagship chipset range.

The Exynos 990 manufactured on the 7nm EUV process and is said to be 20-per cent more power-efficient than the Exynos 9820 and Exynos 9825. The Exynos 990 is the first SoC to sport the new the ARM Mali-G77 MP1 GPU.

According to Samsung, the latest Mali GPU offers a 20-percent improvement in graphics performance thanks to its Valhall architecture. The new Valhall architecture offers a 30-percent increase in power efficiency and performance density as compared to Bifrost architecture found on the Mali-G76.

Samsung also revealed a new 5G-enabled modem for the new chip, the Exynos Modem 5123. The new multi-band modem supports 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. The Exynos Modem 5123 can support downlink speeds of up to 3Gbps and up to 422Mbps uplink speed on 4G LTE. The modem also delivers downlink speeds of up to 5.1Gbps in sub-6GHz and 7.35Gbps in mmWave on 5G.

The new Exynos chip also gets a memory boost to LPDDR5 over the previous LPDDR4X, which supports memory data rates up to 5,500MB/s. The Exynos 990 also supports displays a 120Hz refresh rate and camera sensor up to a 108-megapixel resolution.

Samsung will likely begin mass production of the new chipset and modem by the end of this year, in time to equip it on next year’s Galaxy S11. While the new chip looks ideal for 2020’s flagship devices, the South Korean giant is yet to confirm whether we’ll see it on the Galaxy S11 and Note 11.