Samsung has just announced the Exynos 2100 chipset, which many believe will be powering the Galaxy S21 when it is announced later this week.
The Exynos 2100 is Samsung’s first 5nm chipset, but not the first 5nm chipset on the market – as the Snapdragon 888 5G is also a 5nm. Samsung is promising some big gains on the Exynos 2100 this year, like 30% better CPU performance and 40% better GPU performance, compared to the Exynos 990.
And it looks like Samsung is finally catching up to Qualcomm with the Exynos 2100. Though that has been said every year for the past five years, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Exynos 2100 is built similarly to the Snapdragon 888 5G chipset
As mentioned, the Exynos 2100 is going to be a 5nm chipset, similar to the Snapdragon 888 5G that was announced in December. And thanks to the smaller overall size, the chipset is also going to be 20% more power efficient when compared to its predecessor.
It’s also going to use a tri-cluster architecture. Which features one ARM Cortex X1 core that runs at 2.9GHz, along with three Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores, which are aimed at efficiency.
The Exynos 2100 is using ARM’s latest Mali-G78 GPU. As mentioned, that will provide up to 40% higher graphics performance and will support the latest APIs like Vulkan and OpenCL.
Samsung has equipped the Exynos 2100 with an advanced ISP that does also support up to 200-megapixel cameras and up to six individual sensors.
Finally, this chipset has an integrated 5G modem, that supports sub-6GHz and mmWave.
While not confirmed, the Exynos 2100 is expected to be inside the international variants of the Galaxy S21 series. Much like in previous years, the US and a few other countries will get the Snapdragon version and much of Europe and some parts of Asia will get the Exynos version of the Galaxy S21. Of course, we’ll find out for sure on Thursday when Samsung has its Unpacked event.