Samsung unveils 5G-integrated Exynos 980 mobile processor

South Korean tech giant Samsung on Wednesday launched its latest mobile processor, the Exynos 980 with an integrated 5G modem and intelligent processing performance in a single chip. "With the introduction of our 5G modem last year, Samsung has been driving in the 5G revolution and paved the way towards the next step in mobility," said Ben Hur, vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. 

"With the 5G-integrated Exynos 980, Samsung is pushing to make 5G more accessible to a wider range of users and continues to lead innovation in the mobile 5G market," Hur added. 

The 5G-enabled Exynos 980 not only helps reduce power consumption but also increase the space efficiency within a device. The new mobile processor`s powerful modem supports 5G to 2G networks, providing a fast gigabit downlink speed in 4G LTE and up to 2.55-gigabits per seconds (Gbps) in sub-6-gigahertz (GHz) 5G, the company said in a statement. 

The modem also supports E-UTRA-NR Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), which combines 2CC LTE and 5G connectivity to maximize mobile downlink speed of up to 3.55Gbps. 

In addition, the processor supports a new Wi-Fi 6 standard, IEEE 802.11ax which aims to provide faster speed and greater stability for seamless online gaming and smooth high-resolution video streaming over Wi-Fi networks.

Packing two of the latest high-performance Cortex-A77 CPU cores and six efficient Cortex-A55 cores, the Exynos 980 can deliver the fast and complex computing power required in the 5G era. 

The chipset also comes equipped with a Mali G76 GPU and features an integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for advanced AI capabilities.

For photographers, it can also support up to 108-megapixels camera resolution, encoding and decoding of 4K UHD video at 120 fps and HDR10+.