Samsung announces Exynos chip expected to power the Galaxy S21 internationally

Samsung has announced the Exynos 2100, the mobile processor that’s expected to power its upcoming Galaxy S21 flagship across much of the world outside the US. Like the Exynos 1080 announced last year, it’s built using a 5nm fabrication process, and it’s got an integrated 5G modem that can handle both Sub-6GHz and mmWave.

At the heart of the Exynos 2100 processor is an octa-core CPU which includes one Arm Cortex-X1 core clocked at 2.9GHz, three Cortex-A78 cores, and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores. This CPU is paired with an Arm Mali-G78 GPU, and a tri-core NPU (neural processing unit) for handling AI tasks. Altogether, Samsung says the Exynos offers 10 percent more performance than its 7nm predecessor, or 20 percent lower power consumption.

In terms of camera sensors, the Exynos 2100 supports resolutions of up to 200 megapixels and can connect to as many as six sensors at a time. It’s also able to handle feeds from as many as four cameras at a time, which Samsung says could be used for better zoom or ultrawide photographs.

While Samsung is expected to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 in the Galaxy S21 in the US, it’s this Exynos processor that’ll likely power the phone across much of the rest of the world. However, this dual-processor approach has been criticized in the past when benchmarks have shown that the Exynos chips aren’t as capable as their Snapdragon equivalents (Android Authority has a good rundown of the differences last year). With the Exynos 2100, Samsung is no doubt hoping to close the performance gap between its chips and Qualcomm’s.