Samsung’s first 5nm chip, the Exynos 1080, targets Apple

This week has been particularly busy when it comes to new silicon, because almost immediately after MediaTek announced a number of new chips for phones and Chromebooks, Apple continued with its big M1 chip. Now Samsung has announces its first chip designed using a 5-nanometric process: the Exynos 1080.

Samsung’s new mobile chip stands out for several reasons. The first is that, unlike previous 5nm processors like Apple’s A14 Bionic for iPhones and M1 for Mac and Huawei’s Kirin 9000, the Exynos 1080 was manufactured by Samsung’s own chip foundries, not TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), which was responsible for the production of all other 5nm chips up to ‘now.

Samsung producing its first chip with a 5 nm node could pave the way for other gadget makers to take advantage of Samsung’s EUV FinFet process to create more power and smaller.efficient chips, which should be good for the competition.

Second, using a new eight-core design with four high-performance Cortex-A78 cores (with a core with a slightly higher clock 2.8 GHz speed), four high-efficiency Cortex A55 cores and a built-in 5G modem (which supports both sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G), the Exynos 1080 offers a complete package for all future phones 5G. In addition, the Exynos 1080 has a Mali G78 GPU for better graphics performance as well as support for displays with a 90Hz refresh rate. Other features include support for Wi-Fi 6 , Bluetooth 5.2, a more powerful neural processing unit, etc.

The Exynos 1080 was co-developed by Vivo, and according to Engadget China, Vivo is already planning to use the new chip in a future device.

Finally, since the Exynos 1080 is only a ‘premium’ chip (as its support for 90Hz displays but not 120Hz suggests), it is likely that Samsung is working on an even more powerful chip that could find its way. in some versions of the next. The Galaxy S phone, which would have been announced at the end of January. Typically, Samsung does not showcase its Exynos chips in Galaxy phones sold in the United States, but as we’ve seen with the Galaxy S6 (which used an Exynos 7420 instead of a Qualcomm chip), that’s not entirely out of the question.

Anyway, with companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, and others trying to develop local chips to use in their devices, the battle for silicon supremacy is only just beginning to heat up.