Samsung Exynos 1080: A Strong Contender with 5nm and Cortex-A78

Click the above Computer Enthusiasts to follow us

After entering the 5G era, Samsung has successively released three 5G SoCs: Exynos 980, Exynos 990, and Exynos 880. Among them, the Exynos 990 is positioned as the flagship, aimed at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865, and is the exclusive heart of the Galaxy S20 series flagship phones. The Exynos 980 and Exynos 880 are positioned for the mid-range market, primarily used in vivo’s mobile phones.

Samsung and vivo jointly customized the Exynos 980 mobile platform last year

Unfortunately, in this round of competition for 5G SoCs, the performance of the Exynos series chips has not been impressive. The Exynos 990 is not as strong as the Dimensity 1000+ and Snapdragon 865, while the Exynos 980 and Exynos 880 can only surpass the Dimensity 720, showing significantly weaker competitiveness.

To enhance Exynos’s influence in the mid-to-high-end 5G SoC market, Samsung has once again teamed up with vivo to customize the new Exynos 1080 mobile platform.

We can understand the Exynos 1080 as an iterative upgrade of the Exynos 980 released during the same period last year, but its specifications have undergone a qualitative change.

Specifically, the Exynos 1080 will use Samsung’s most advanced 5nm LPE process, a leap from the 8nm process used by the previous Exynos 980. At the same time, the Exynos 1080 will also adopt ARM’s latest Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 dual-cluster CPU architecture, with the integrated GPU upgraded to ARM’s latest Mali-G78.

According to ARM’s official data, the Cortex-A78 has a 7% improvement in IPC (instructions per cycle) compared to the previous Cortex-A77, with a 4% reduction in power consumption, a 5% smaller core, and a 15% reduction in the area of the quad-core cluster.

Assuming that the power consumption of a single “big core” in the SoC under full load is about 1W, the Cortex-A77 produced by the 7nm process can run at 2.6GHz, while the Cortex-A78 produced by the 5nm process can reach 3GHz, which means a 20% performance increase at the same power consumption. Conversely, assuming the same performance, the 2.1GHz Cortex-A78 produced by the 5nm process consumes 50% less power than the 2.3GHz Cortex-A77 produced by the 7nm process.

Of course, as a mid-to-high-end product, Samsung is unlikely to set the maximum frequency of the Exynos 1080’s big core at 3GHz; its main frequency will likely be between 2.2GHz and 2.6GHz.

Now let’s take a look at the integrated Mali-G78 GPU in the Exynos 1080. It still uses the Valhall graphics architecture adopted by the Mali-G77, but it optimizes the global clock domain, changing to a new two-level structure, achieving separation between the upper shared GPU module and the actual shader core frequency, which is an asynchronous clock domain. This allows the GPU core to operate at different frequencies from other parts, effectively balancing the geometric output with computation, texture, and engine, while also allowing the GPU to run at different voltages to reduce power consumption and improve energy efficiency, which is also common practice in desktop CPUs and GPUs.

During the Mali-G77 era, it could be paired with up to 16 compute units, that is, Mali-G77 MC16, but due to cost, heat generation, and power consumption constraints, even the most aggressive Exynos 990 only used 11 compute units, namely Mali-G77 MC11, while the Dimensity 1000+ was equipped with Mali-G77 MC9.

This time, the Mali-G78 can be equipped with up to 24 compute units, an increase of 50% compared to its predecessor. However, for the reasons mentioned above, even with the latest 5nm process, the actual maximum commercial scale is estimated to be around 16 units; any more would be difficult to manage thermal dissipation in smartphones. Considering the positioning of the Exynos 1080, Samsung will likely prepare 5 to 8 compute cores for it, which corresponds to Mali-G78MC5 to Mali-G78MC8 levels.

Since the specific specifications of the Exynos 1080 (number and frequency of CPU big and small cores, GPU scale and frequency) are not detailed, we cannot speculate on its actual performance. However, based on Samsung’s disclosed AnTuTu score for the Exynos 1080 (650,000), this figure has already surpassed the Exynos 990 and Snapdragon 865, indicating that the comprehensive performance of the Exynos 1080 has reached the flagship level of 2020.

The Samsung Exynos 1080 is likely to be launched first in the vivo X60 series, with an expected starting price still around 3000 yuan. If it can indeed provide performance comparable to the Snapdragon 865, combined with the inherent power-saving advantages of the 5nm process, its competitiveness will far exceed that of its predecessor, the Exynos 980.

In addition to the Exynos 1080, Samsung is also preparing the next generation flagship 5G SoC, the Exynos 2100, which will also use a 5nm process but will upgrade to a tri-cluster CPU architecture consisting of Cortex-X1 + Cortex-A78 + Cortex-A55, and is expected to introduce AMD-customized GPU units to compete with the Kirin 9000, Snapdragon 875, and Dimensity 2000 series.

Click “Read the original” for more exciting content

Related posts

Leave a Comment Cancel reply