Samsung Electronics targets Huawei’s vacancy through a self-developed 5-nano mobile chip

▲ Product image Samsung Exynos 980 ⓒ Samsung Electronics

While Chinese smartphone makers are busy bridging the gap between Huawei, which has been slowed by US sanctions, Samsung Electronics is actively expanding its mobile application processor (AP) attack.

According to related industry and foreign media on the 13th, Samsung Electronics held a public event for its mobile AP’Exynos 1080 ‘in Shanghai, China, the day before.

This is the first time that Samsung Electronics has publicly introduced smartphone components such as mobile APs in China. The AP is a component that plays a key role in arithmetic processing and is valued as the brain and driving core of a smartphone.

According to market research firm Counterpoint Research, Qualcomm in the US continues to be the # 1 market in the mobile AP market as of the second quarter with a market share of 29%. This was followed by Taiwan’s MediaTek (26%) and Huawei’s subsidiary Hi Silicon (16%).

Most Chinese smartphone makers are adopting Qualcomm’s mobile APs, and Huawei’s subsidiary Hi Silicon is also increasing its market share.

However, since the US sanctions against China seriously, Huawei has suffered a severe blow from semiconductor supply and demand. It is interpreted that it is no stranger to this that Samsung Electronics is accelerating its attack on the Chinese AP market.

The ‘Exynos 1080’, which Samsung Electronics unveiled this time around, is the first high-performance mobile chip manufactured by Samsung Electronics through the extreme 5-nano ultraviolet (EUV) process. By integrating a 5G modem, it supports both sub-6G㎐ (sub-6G㎐) and ultra-high frequency (mmWave) network connections.

Using the ARM Cortex-A78 core and Cortex-A55 core, which offer processing speeds of up to 2.8G velocità, the performance of the central processing unit (CPU) is almost doubled compared to the previous generation.

By applying the ARM Mali-G78 graphics processing unit (GPU), the performance of the graphics processing unit is also improved more than twice. It supports a screen refresh rate of up to 144㎐ with Full HD + resolution.

A high-performance neural network processing unit (NPU) and digital signal processing unit (DSP) can perform up to 5.7 trillion operations per second, supporting various artificial intelligence applications. The Image Signal Processing Unit (ISP) supports up to 200 million pixels and 6 cameras.

Exynos 1080 is expected to be installed first in Chinese smartphone maker Vivo’s new products and should actively protect customers in the future.

In this way, Samsung Electronics should provide a real boost to the LSI system and Samsung’s foundry business.