The 7nm Exynos 990 chipset that debuted with the Galaxy S20 series was heavily criticized due to its relatively higher power consumption and performance throttling. Later, it was revealed that Samsung is making improvements to the chipset and is planning to launch a revised version of the processor in the second half of this year. Now, it is being reported that the South Korean tech giant will start the mass production of 5nm Exynos chipsets from August.
According to the information from industry sources who talked to ZDNet Korea, Samsung has completed all preparations needed for the mass production of the next-generation Exynos SoC based on the 5nm EUV process. Now, Samsung's semiconductor arm is waiting for the smartphone division's decision of whether or not to use it in the Galaxy Note 20 series. The company had recently announced that it is ready to start the mass production of 5nm chipsets.
The report states that the Exynos 992 could use ARM's new Cortex-A78 CPU and Mali-G78 GPU architectures for improved performance. It also says that Samsung will use the 5nm Exynos processor in the South Korean version of the Galaxy Note 20 to display the competitive edge of its Foundry and System LSI divisions. However, there are some inconsistencies in the report. ARM's new CPU and GPU aren't expected to make it into chipsets before 2021, so you should take this information with a pinch fo salt.
It was also rumored that Samsung is designing a custom SoC for Google. The processor reportedly uses two Cortex-A78 CPU cores, two Cortex-A76 CPU cores, four Cortex-A55 CPU cores, Mali-G78 MP20 GPU, and Google's Visual Core ISP and NPU. The South Korean firm had started the development of two Mongoose custom CPU cores but ditched those projects and decided to go with stock ARM cores. Samsung also decided to switch to AMD Radeon graphics for its 2021 Exynos processor.
