Samsung Announces Exynos 980 - Mid-Range With Integrated 5G Modem

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In a surprise announcement, Samsung today unveiled their very first SoC with integrated 5G connectivity. The new chipset isn’t a flagship follow-up to the Exynos 9825 and 9820, but rather a new entry to the mid-range and seemingly a follow-up to the Exynos 9610 chipset. Nevertheless, the new chip brings a slew of new firsts to the market which should help the new Exynos 980 to be extremely competitive with upcoming offerings from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

The very odd thing about the Exynos 980 is its new naming scheme. This is the first time Samsung has opted for a three numeral scheme in its Exynos line-up which is certainly bound to be a bit confusing at the beginning, certainly also because of similarities in the naming to the Kirin 980. However it’s quite evident that this new chip looks to be a follow-up to the Exynos 9610. I’m questioning Samsung’s naming scheme here and how it’ll play out for its follow-up chips both in the mid-range and next flagship iterations.

Nevertheless, the new Exynos 980 is the first chip to be announced to come with the new Cortex-A77 CPU from Arm. Whilst Samsung was able to jump the gun here in terms of announcement, we’re still expecting HiSilicon to be the first to market with a SoC with the new CPU in the next few weeks. Samsung’s integration of the new CPU within a mid-range SoC is quite aggressive, particularly seeing that the company lagged behind in this regard in previous generation Exynos SoCs such as the 9610. The A77 cores are clocked in at 2.2GHz which is naturally quite a bit less than what we expect of flagships, but the cores should be extremely efficient in this implementation. The two big cores are accompanied by 6 Cortex-A55’s at 1.8GHz, making this a octa-core SoC.

The GPU on the Exynos 980 is the same as its last flagship SoCs, a Mali-G76, however this time it’s only in an MP5 configuration which is less than half the cores of its flagship counterpart. I’m expecting the clock frequency of this GPU to be a lot more aggressive than its flagship counter-part, so performance should be more than half, which is actually quite a good performance target relative to Qualcomm’s mid-range SoCs.

The new chip is also the first mid-range from Samsung to integrate their in-house NPU architecture which the company promotes as augmenting camera capture abilities of the SoC platform.

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