Samsung has announced something that will make the 5G support on smartphones at lot easier. The company has revealed a new processor in its Exynos lineup at the IFA 2019 which is the Exynos 980. One of the major highlights regarding this processor is that it has 5G support built-in. This means that if you have a smartphone powered by Samsung’s Exynos 980, you don’t need a dedicated 5G modem for that 5G support. This is currently the case with Qualcomm chipsets which do require a separate 5G modem from Qualcomm itself.
With the launch of Samsung’s Exynos 980, that requirement will be redundant at least on Samsung flagships as well as other manufacturers who decide to use Samsung SoCs. Qualcomm has also announced that it will add 5G modem inside its next flagship processor. Therefore, we can say that the Snapdragon 865 SoC will support 5G.
However, Samsung has now become the first chipmaker to launch a CPU with 5G built inside it. Also, Samsung made its announcement even before Huawei which is expected to launch its Kirin 990 processor with 5G inside the CPU too. Having said that, we also know that Snapdragon processors are used on most of the smartphones barring Samsung and Huawei. Even Samsung uses Qualcomm chips on its flagship smartphones in the US due to a patent. Thus, it makes much more sense to get excited about Qualcomm’s dedicated 5G CPU instead of Huawei’s Kirin 990 or Exynos 980 from Samsung.
Nonetheless, we can surely say that the next Samsung and Huawei flagships will definitely have 5G support. Talking about Exynos 980’s 5G support, Samsung claims “gigabit speeds for LTE and up to 2.55Gbps sub-6GHz 5G speeds” on its processor. Samsung says that its processor is built on the 8nm process. Samsung’s Exynos 980 SoC supports 2G, 3G, 4G as well as 5G networks.