Samsung Exynos 1080: 5nm mobile SoC comes with ARM's Cortex-A78 CPU cores, Mali-G78 GPU, and more

Samsung's 'mid-range' Exynos 1080 SoC has been in the limelight for quite some time now. Leaked performance benchmarks have sung praises of the silicon, as it surpassed the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ and managed to trade blows with Huawei's new Kirin 9000. The chip is now official, and its spec sheet looks mighty impressive. An earlier leak told us that it would use Samsung's 5nm EUV process node and come with ARM's Cortex-A78 cores. However, it left out one crucial detail; its core configuration.

The Exynos 1080 is one of the very few non-flagship mobile SoCs to employ a 1+3+4 configuration. Its prime Cortex-A78 core is clocked at 2.8GHz, with the remaining three Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55 cores running at 2.6GHz and 2.0GHz, respectively. Samsung claims that this configuration allows the Exynos 1080 to double up on the Exynos 990- with up to 50% higher single-core and double the multi-score performance. Its ARM Mali-G78 MP10 GPU is also said to be over 2.3 times faster than the Mali-G77. While those numbers are undoubtedly impressive, the Exynos 990 wasn't Samsung' best work, so it isn't much of a yardstick, to begin with.

Although it is classified as a mid-range SoC, the Exynos 1080 has all the bells and whistles of a flagship chipset. It supports up to six cameras and can run a single 200MP sensor or two 32MP sensors-10-bit 4K video recording is possible too. It can push a 1440p screen at 90Hz or a 1080p screen at 144Hz. The former is quite essential, as that has single-handedly prevented the Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Note 20 series smartphones from running their 1440p screens at anything above 60Hz. Future gaming smartphones could likely leverage its ability to run FHD+ screens at 144Hz too. The aforementioned features, combined with compatibility with UFS 3.1 storage and LPDDR4x/LPDDR5 RAM, put it in quasi flagship territory.

Other Exynos 1080 features include a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit) capable of up to 5.7 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and a dedicated 5G modem that works with both sub-6GHz and mmWave networks. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 is supported too. The Exynos 1080 is billed to debut alongside the Vivo X60 soon, and remain exclusive to the Chinese market for a certain period. Given its impressive processing power, the Exynos 1080 will likely find its way into a host of mid-range and upper-mid-range offerings by OEMs like Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi in 2021.