Samsung's new Exynos 1080 is a powerful 5nm chipset designed for mid-range phones

Samsung today introduced its very first 5nm Exynos chipset at an event held in China. The premium mid-range chipset succeeds the Exynos 980 chipset, which was announced in September last year.

The new Exynos 1080 uses four ARM Cortex-A78 cores and four ARM Cortex-A55 cores. Out of the four Cortex-A78 cores, one is clocked at 2.8 GHz, while the other three run at 2.6GHz. The four Cortex-A55 cores all run at 2GHz. Samsung claims the chip offers a 50% increase in single-core performance and a 2x increase in multi-core performance when compared to its previous-gen chipsets.

When it comes to graphics, the Exynos 1080 chipset uses a Mali-G78 MP10 GPU. Samsung says the GPU is up to 2.3 times more powerful than the Mali-G77 MP11 GPU used on the Exynos 990. It can support WQHD+ displays with up to 90Hz refresh rate and Full HD+ displays up to 144Hz refresh rate. As expected from a modern chipset, the Exynos 1080 supports LPDDR5 memory and UFS 3.1 storage. It can also support up to 200MP resolution cameras, along with up to 4K 60fps and HDR10+ video recording.

On the connectivity front, the Exynos 1080 supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. The integrated 5G modem supports both sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G, with maximum download speeds of up to 5.1 Gbps.

As rumored previously, Samsung has confirmed that Vivo will be the first brand to launch a phone powered by the Exynos 1080 chipset. The 'flagship' Vivo phone is expected to be launched early next year.