Just ahead of its first Unpacked event, Samsung has unveiled its latest flagship mobile chip, the Exynos 2100. It is the first flagship chip by the company that comes with an integrated 5G modem and is the first chipset that got its own launch event.
According to Samsung, the new SoC has been designed to provide 10% higher performance with 20% lower power consumption. Moreover, its CPU is 30% faster in multi-core tasks compared to the Exynos 990.
Like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888, the Exynos 2100 is fabbed at Samsung’s 5nm EUV foundries. Hence, it does not come with any process-related advantage over Qualcomm’s SD888 chip.
CPU
The new chipset adopts ARM’s new high-performance Cortex-X1 core and runs it at 2.9 GHz. The core is accompanied by three A78 cores, plus four power-efficient A55 cores. The company has also implemented a multi-IP governor to optimize the power usage of the CPU, GPU, and other elements of the chipset.
GPU
The chipset sports the all-new Mali-G78 with 14 cores that, according to Samsung, provides a 40% performance boost over its predecessor. Similar to SD888 the tri-core NPU uses a new architecture and reaches 26 TOPS. This new design doubles the power efficiency compared to previous generations.
Image Signal Processor
Exynos 2100 comes with a new Image Signal Processor (ISP) that supports camera sensors of up to 200 MP. Moreover, it can be connected to six individual sensors and process data from four of them simultaneously. For comparison, SD888 can only manage three streams.
The Multi-camera and Frame Processor (MCFP) onboard can merge data from multiple cameras for better quality zoom and ultra-wide shots.
5G Modem
As mentioned, the Exynos 2100 is the first flagship SoC by the company that comes with an integrated 5G modem. Exynos 980 and 1080 have integrated modems too, but they are upper midrange chips and not designed for the top of the line smartphones. According to the company, the SoC can achieve 7.35 Gbps downlink speeds on a mmWave network and 5.1 Gbps on a sub-6 network, matching the Exynos 990.
The chipset is in mass production and will be seen on the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S21 first.
