Samsung’s next-generation midrange SoC (system on a chip) is the newly introduced Exynos 1080. The new chipset offers the latest Cortex-A78 CPU cores paired with the latest Mali-G78 graphics core. It’s the first SoC in which Samsung is adopting a new 1+3+4 CPU configuration with one core clocked at 2.8GHz and 3 others at 2.6GHz. This is supplemented by 4 more Cortex-A55 cores which are clocked at 2.0GHz.

The chipset is built on a 5nm process, which has until now only been used by Apple in their A14 processor. The new 5nm, octa-core Exynos 1080 touts better performance with the new architecture and also boasts significant power efficiency boosts. According to Samsung, the single-core performance has been boosted by 50% while the multi-core performance is boosted by 100%.

In addition to the power savings from the architecture itself, Samsung has also introduced a power-saving solution it calls “Amigo Power”. The new solution will help monitor and optimize battery consumption. Samsung is touting that the solution will make the Exynos 1080 10% more power-efficient than its predecessor. Samsung has also spent some time optimising the NPU and DSP which boast a machine-learning interference power of 5.7TOPs indicating that any AI programs running on the SoC should be able to crunch more data at any given time. This should indicate better, quicker image post-processing and optimizations in both user experience and response speed.

Power consumption isn’t the only area Samsung is focusing on. The Exynos 1080 SoC can support a single 200MP camera or dual 32MP + 32MP sensors. On the video end of things, the processor is able to support shooting up to 4K resolution at 60fps.

Connectivity-wise, the Exynos 1080 is going to be able to support 5G on both the sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrum which indicates that the SoC could be making it to the U.S. given that, until now, the U.S. is the only country with official rollout of 5G on the Sub-6 wavelength. Aside from 5G, the SoC supports Cat.18 4G LTE connectivity. The Exynos 1080 will also support Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity. In addition to this, the SoC will support up to 144Hz refresh rate, LPDDR5 RAM and has UFS 3.1 compatibility.

The Exynos 1080 will be available in the market in Q1 of 2021. That said, it looks like it will be making its way to consumers in a new Vivo device first. It has been confirmed that the SoC will see its debut in the Vivo X60 series come 2021. Vivo will also be using last year’s Exynos 980 in their upcoming X30 series smartphones.