Samsung Exynos 980: The SoC with integrated 5G modem
Samsung Exynos 980 is the first SOC of the South Korean manufacturer to have integrated a 5G modem. This is a small step forward to allow this connection technology to spread and look to the future.
5G will be one of the hot topics of the near future considering that it will be one of the possible points with which to entice users to change smartphones. And that’s why the South Korean manufacturer presented the new Samsung Exynos 980, a SoC with integrated 5G modem.
This is an interesting novelty as the current models that support 5G connectivity exploit ” external ” modems such as Snapdragon X50 or Exynos 5100. Thanks to Samsung Exynos 980 it will be possible to create a more compact and more efficient design while ensuring support for most-recent connection technologies.
According to the manufacturer, this new SoC is made using the FinFET 8 nm production process. Not only that, Samsung Exynos 980 allows you to take advantage of artificial intelligence technologies (as expected from a 2019 processor) without sacrificing overall performance.
Inside the processor, we find two Cortex-A77 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.2 GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores with a maximum frequency of 1.8 GHz. The integrated GPU is instead of a Mali-G76 MP5. The AI management is entrusted to the NPU which should provide performance 2.7 times higher than the previous model and allowing the management of many local operations rather than having to exploit an external server for processing.
Returning to connectivity, Samsung Exynos 980 supports 2G up to 5G networks reaching a download speed of up to 1 Gb/s for LTE and up to 2.55 Gb/s in 5G sub-6 GHz. The E-UTRA-NR Dual connectivity (abbreviated to EN-DC) so as to allow the LTE 2CC and 5G to be used to reach a download speed of up to 3.55 Gb/s. Then there is support for Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax).
As for the photographic part, sensors with a resolution of up to 108 MPixels are supported with the ISP that allows the management of five sensors (or three sensors simultaneously). Also in this case it is then possible to exploit the NPU to improve performance in processing, manage scenarios, improve the quality of photographs and have a better overall experience.
The new Samsung Exynos 980 supports encoding and decoding of video streams with 4K/UHD resolution at 120 fps. There is also support for HDR10+ technology to further improve the experience of viewing movies. As it can be guessed above all from the internal structure, it is a SoC destined for the mid-range of the market, but it also allows you to get an idea of what awaits us with the arrival of the new generation that will be used with Galaxy S11 next year.
