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Samsung Announces Exynos 2100 SoC: A New Restart on 5nm with X1 Cores
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Today, Samsung LSI took the virtual stage to announce the new Exynos 2100 flagship SoC. The new chip is quite special for Samsung’s chip division as it marks a departure from past iteration designs – being the first SoC not using Samsung’s own in-house performance CPU microarchitecture, but instead relying on Arm’s Cortex cores such as the new X1.

It’s a big change for Samsung not just technologically, but also in terms of general tone and messaging – with a much more upbeat enthusiasm from the company and also the first ever actually presented launch event for a Samsung mobile SoC, more closely mimicking what we would see from Qualcomm.

The new SoC promises some very large technical upgrades – the aforementioned new Cortex-X1 performance CPU, a very large GPU performance boost, but also very large gains in things like AI performance, a re-integrated leading 5G modem, camera support for up to 200MP sensors, AV1 video decoding, all on a new 5nm process node.

Starting off with the big-ticket item today, it surrounds Samsung’s usage of the new Arm Cortex-X1 CPU cores. This follows a 5 year journey that had started off with the Exynos 8890 back in 2016 and the Galaxy S7 series of devices- with Samsung using their own designed CPU microarchitecture dubbed the M1 through to the M5 CPU in last year’s Exynos 990 used in the Galaxy S20 series.

Unfortunately, Samsung’s own designs were never really successful, and actually brought the opposite of what the company had hoped for – instead of positive differentiation in the SoC market the usage of custom cores was actually more of a negative, bringing with them reduced performance and quite worse power efficiency compared to the Arm Cortex counterparts. While Samsung had been patient with the SARC CPU design team, too many failures in a row, particularly big blunders such as the Exynos 9810 and the Exynos 990 resulted in the termination of the project, with Samsung now choosing to simply just use Arm Cortex cores.

In last year’s Cortex-X1 announcement from Arm, Samsung was actually one of the leading partners which publicly acknowledged their use of the new high-performance CPU IP, and today’s announcement of the Exynos 2100 unveils the fruits of this collaboration.

The new Exynos 2100 follows a CPU configuration that had been first introduced by Qualcomm in the Snapdragon 855 in that it’s a 1+3+4 CPU design, featuring one new high-performance Cortex-X1 core clocking up to 2.9GHz, three Cortex-A78 cores up to 2.8GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores at up to 2.2GHz.

What’s interesting here about this setup is the clock frequencies, and how they contrast to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 which was released a few weeks ago and is starting to ship in the first new flagship devices of 2021.

Particularly on the middle and on the efficiency cores, the Exynos chip shows a 400MHz advantage in clock frequencies over the Snapdragon chip, which should result in a notable advantage when it comes to multi-threaded CPU workloads.

On the part of the X1 cores at 2.9GHz – well it’s a shame we again just missed the mark on the symbolic 3GHz mark this generation, but it’s still 60MHz higher than the Snapdragon counterpart so it should result in a small performance boost, although I doubt it’ll be noticeable.

Samsung actually did have some performance figures shown during the presentation, including the expected 33% multi-threaded performance boost thanks to the now much higher performance middle cores.

I was actually delighted to also see Samsung post a separate 19% single-threaded performance figure – however this number is a bit odd to me as the jump from a 2.7GHz Exynos M5 to a 2.9GHz Cortex-X1 should be larger than that. I don’t know what Samsung uses in terms of coming to these figures, but I’m optimistic that things could end up higher than just 19%.

As part of the launch event presentation Samsung also claimed to have included “better cache memory” – this could be a reference to a possible 8MB L3 cache in the CPU cluster, but could also be related to a better system-cache structure. They had also made mention of a more efficient voltage control implementation – what exactly this means in practice is open to interpretation but one area Samsung could differentiate itself from the Snapdragon 888 is to give the Cortex-X1 cores their own dedicated voltage rail. We’ll have to see how the actual SoC behaves as Samsung doesn’t go into such technical depth for their chip launches.
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