Samsung Exynos 1480 detailed: A big boost for Galaxy A phones?

Samsung recently launched the Galaxy A55 5G, and that phone is powered by the Exynos 1480 chipset. Fortunately, the company has fully peeled the curtain back on this new processor.

Samsung Semiconductor posted a comprehensive product page for the Exynos 1480 on its website, and we’ve got a good look at most of the major specs. For one, the new processor is built on a 4nm Samsung manufacturing process compared to the Exynos 1380’s 5nm design. The company adds that the Exynos 1480 is 22% more efficient than the old chip, which should make for a notable boost to battery life.

The new chipset retains the same CPU as last year’s processor, featuring four Cortex-A78 big cores and four Cortex-A55 little cores. However, Samsung has boosted the peak clock speeds from 2.4GHz to 2.75GHz. Taken together, Samsung claims 13% faster app launching and 18% faster multi-core performance.

The big upgrade this year, however, is the debut of an AMD GPU in a mid-range Exynos processor. Samsung’s chipset brings an Xclipse 530 GPU, with the manufacturer stating that it packs the latest mobile RDNA graphics tech (ostensibly RDNA 3). In any event, the Xclipse 530 GPU doesn’t appear to support hardware-based ray tracing but does offer features like variable rate shading and super-resolution support.  Samsung also claims a huge 53% boost in graphical performance over the Exynos 1380’s admittedly old Mali-G68 MP5 GPU.

AI is also a big theme this year, and the Exynos 1480 brings an improved NPU and overall AI engine. The company is touting a four-fold improvement in AI performance over last year’s chip. We’ve asked Samsung Semiconductor whether the chipset supports Google’s Gemini Nano AI model (used for tasks like article summaries), but the company wasn’t able to give us an answer in time for publication.

The Exynos 1480 brings the same camera capabilities as the Exynos 1380 at first glance (e.g. 200MP single camera support), but we also get support for 4K/60fps capture. That’s a notable upgrade over 4K/30fps capture seen on the old chip. Unfortunately, AV1 decoding isn’t supported here.

Other features worth knowing include new-found support for Wi-Fi 6E, a faster cellular modem, Bluetooth 5.3, and a 144Hz refresh rate at FHD+ resolution.

The Exynos 1480 is currently available in the Samsung Galaxy A55, but this phone isn’t coming to the US. There’s also no word on whether other phones with this chip will be available in the US. This nevertheless looks like a solid mid-tier processor, but Qualcomm is bringing an intimidating rival in the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3.