Huawei recently announced the Kirin 990 5G chipset based on the 7 nm manufacturing process and it has been introduced on Mate 30-Pro flagship. To keep up with the competition Samsung, which also makes its own custom silicon, has announced its new flagship chipset Exynos 990.

Samsung Exynos 990.

Samsung had announced the Exynos 9820 back in September and it would appear that the 990 is an incremental version to the chipset. It is a 7nm EUV processor just like Huawei’s Kirin 990 5G chipset and has 8 cores in a 2+2+4 tri-cluster CPU configuration. We have 4X Cortex-A55 cores and 2X Cortex-A76 cores and 2X 5th-generation custom CPU cores.

While Samsung has kept the clock-speed on the new chipset hidden it has said that the new custom CPU cores performance has increased by 20% compared to its predecessor. The new processor also has a Mali-G77 MP11 for graphical requirements which replaces the Mali-G76 MP12 of the Exynos 9820. It also has a 120 Hz refresh rate support and a 10-bit video and HDR display support.

In terms of connectivity and support the Exynos 990 supports LPDDR5 RAM, UFS 3.0 and UFS 2.1 storage. The Exynos Modem 5123 on the chipset is said to provide "ultra-fast" 5G with download speeds of up to 7.35 Gbps in mmWave and 5.1 Gbps in a sub-6GHz setting with up to 8x carrier aggregation.

The Exynos 990 has a Dual-Core NPU and an improved Digital Signal Processor which is said to improve the camera performance. The SoC supports up to six cameras with resolutions up to 108MP. The Samsung Galaxy S11-series is said to be powered by this new chipset.