Samsung's New Exynos 990 Beats Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus & Huawei Kirin 990 5G

Karamchand Rameshwar - Oct 30, 2019

Benchmark scores of Samsung's latest Exynos 990 SoC suggest that the chipset is more powerful than Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus and Huawei Kirin 990 SoC.

Recently, Samsung has launched the first processor of the Exynos 99x series, which will be equipped on the Galaxy S11 launched next year. Samsung's new Exynos 990 is manufactured on the 7nm process, using the extreme ultraviolet lithography process (EUV), and has superior performance compared to its Exynos 9820 and Exynos 9825.

The Exynos 9820 on the Galaxy S10 is a processor manufactured on the 8nm process, using old technology, whereas the Exynos 9825 on Galaxy Note 10 is manufactured on the 7nm process, using new EUV technology. However, in terms of performance, Exynos 9825 is still inferior to Apple's A13 SoC or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC.

However, with Exynos 990, Samsung has taken a leap of performance to be able to surpass its rivals and integrate the most advanced technology.

In terms of performance scores, Exynos 990 scored 4,160 points the single-core test and 12,946 points multi-core test, beating both Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus and Huawei's Kirin 990 SoC. However, with this performance score, Exynos 990 is still inferior to Apple's A13 chip.

The Exynos 990 processor chip will help Samsung pave the way for the first smartphones to be equipped with DDR5 RAM, besides supporting the 108MP camera and 120Hz screen. In particular, Exynos 990 is integrated with a 7W mmWave 5G Exynos 5123 modem, with a faster speed to Qualcomm's modem chip. These could be valuable and much more important features than processor performance.

The first phone expected to feature this new chipset is the Galaxy S11, though other rumors suggest that the handset might come with an Exynos 9830 SoC instead. Lines of code discovered in the company's beta version of OneUI 2.0 suggest that the device will come either Exynos 9830 or Snapdragon 865 SoC. Moreover, it is revealed to support LPDDR5 memory, 5G connectivity, UFS 3.0 storage, and Face Unlock feature. In addition, other leaks suggest that Samsung already finalized the design of its upcoming Galaxy S11 series and will announce them early next year.