Today, Samsung unveiled its initial foray into full solution system-on-a-chip game today with the new Exynos ModAP. While Samsung has been touting its quad- and octo-core Exynos processors for some time now, they’ve recently been relegated to 3G-only smartphones or WiFi tablets due to a lack of integrated LTE.
ModAP is the company’s first SoC with on-die LTE integration, expanding its potential usability in the growing North American, Asian and European smartphone markets, increasingly reliant on the ultra-fast wireless technology for diminishing-cost smartphones. While the chip itself is only quad-core, built on a 28nm HKMG process, the potential here is huge: Qualcomm has a de facto monopoly of LTE-capable SoCs in North America, so the potential for Samsung to interrupt is a big deal.
The ModAP is a 3GPP Release 9, Cat-4 LTE chip, too, which brings carrier aggregation and 150Mbps potential speeds as well. The built-in Image Signal Processor (ISP) is slightly underwhelming, capable of supporting an 8MP sensor and 1080p video at 30fps.
While the ModAP chip itself is not going to blow away Qualcomm’s Krait in terms of performance, the fact that Samsung has finally solved the integrated LTE on SoC problem is significant.
[source]Samsung Exynos[/source]
