Samsung unveils the Exynos 990 chipset expected to power the upcoming Galaxy flagships

Samsung just showcased its upcoming flagship chipset that will power high-end devices in 2020. Meet the new Exynos 990 SoC and the Exynos Modem 5123.

At Samsung’s Annual Tech Day, the company unexpectedly took the wraps off the next generation of processors, which are likely to power 2020 flagships. The stage was shared by a new 5G modem that can equip mobile devices with exhaustive 5G connectivity capabilities. Both of them are expected to go into mass production by the end of this year.

Samsung Exynos 990 mobile processor

The Exynos 990 is a 7nm EUV octa-core chipset in a tri-cluster format consisting of two new custom Exynos M5 cores, which are supposed to be 20% faster than the M4 cores on the Exynos 9820, followed by two high-performance Cortex-A77 cores, along with four Cortex-A55 cores for efficiency. The overall improvement is said to be around 13%.

Graphical duties will be handled by the new Arm Mali-G77 MP11 GPU, which implements a modern Valhall architecture, promising performance improvements of up to 20% or a 20% increase in efficiency. The Exynos 990 is amongst the first chipsets to employ the new Arm GPU.

Exynos 990 specifications

One of the more significant improvements comes with the move to LPDDR5 memory from the aging LPDDR4X standard, taking the memory controller frequency to 2,750MHz and memory data rates to 5,500 Mbps. Power efficiency gains are also expected.

On-device Artificial Intelligence will take a huge leap forward with a dual-core NPU and the new DSP, which can perform over ten-trillion operations per second (10 TOPs), up from the Exynos 9820’s 1.86TOPs of computational throughput.

The spec sheet also mentions that the Exynos 990 can support displays with a refresh rate of 120Hz or a max resolution of 4k UHD (4,096 x 2,160) with HDR. As expected, UFS 3.0 and UFS 2.1 storage will be supported. In terms of imaging, it can handle cameras with a 108MP resolution or dual 24.8MP sensors. Video recording capabilities will include 8K video capture at 30fps or 4K at 120fps along with encoding and decoding with 10-bit HEVC(H.265), H.264, VP9 formats.

Samsung Exynos Modem 5123

The new 5G modem offers a complete multi-band solution which covers everything from 2G to 5G, in both mmWave and Sub-6 flavors. Theoretical data transmission speeds for 4G LTE go up to 3Gbps downlink and 422Mbps uplink. Download speeds in mmWave will go up to 7.35Gbps and 5.1Gbps in the sub-6GHz setting with 8x carrier aggregation. The Exynos Modem 5123 also supports E-UTRA-NR Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), which combines LTE and 5G connectivity to maximize downlink speeds. The 7nm EUV fabrication process should help in improving battery efficiency.

The Modem 5123 is likely to come paired with the Exynos 990 chipsets, which could imply 5G capabilities on all Exynos flagship devices for 2020. The Samsung Galaxy S11 is expected to be the platform where these new chipsets will debut, along with the next generation Galaxy Fold.

• Everything we know about the Samsung Galaxy S11
• What is 5G?
• The Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 could arrive as early as April 2020