South Korean giant Samsung has announced its latest smartphone chipset — Exynos 990. Interestingly, the launch of this new Exynos 990 SoC comes just a month after the company announced Exynos 980 smartphone processor.
The new chipset is manufactured using the 7nm EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) lithography processing technology for better power efficiency. This is the same technology used by Exynos 9825 SoC that powers the Galaxy Note10.
It comes with a tri-cluster CPU structure that consists of two powerful custom cores, two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores. It also has dual-core neural processing unit (NPU) and improved digital signal processor (DSP) that can perform over ten-trillion operations (TOPs) per second.
In terms of graphics, the chipset packs Mali-G77 MP11 GPU which Samsung claims is the first premium GPU based on the new Valhall architecture. It promises graphic performance or power efficiency improvement by up to 20 percent compared to Exynos 9820 with Mali-G76 MP12 GPU.
The chipset also supports LPDDR5 with data rates of up to 5,500 megabits per second (MB/s) for wider memory bandwidth than its predecessor with LPDDR4x. In addition to 10-bit video and HDR display support, the processor also features a 120Hz refresh-rate display driver.
In the camera department, the Exynos 990 SoC supports up to six individual sensors with ultra-high resolution up to 108 MP and is able to process three sensors concurrently. It has DRAM encryption engine to protect data safer with faster processing speed. There’s Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) which generates a unique key based on the physical properties of each chip while Integrated secure element (iSE) layer stores and handles personal data separately from the OS environment.
Coming to connectivity, the chipset supports wide range of network such as 5G’s sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrums to 2G GSM/CDMA, 3G WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, HSPA and 4G LTE. Thanks to E-UTRA-NR Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), it combines LTE and 5G connectivity to maximize mobile downlink speed.
Samsung Exynos 990 SoC is expected to get mass produced by the end of this year. This means that we can expect this new chipset to power the company’s upcoming Galaxy S11 flagship smartphone or the next-generation Galaxy Fold smartphone.
