Earlier this month, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy A55, the highest-specced A-series smartphone. Among the specs, we learned that the phone comes with Samsung's in-house Exynos 1480 chip. However, Samsung never revealed the exact details of this SoC.
Well, until now, that is. We finally know everything that we can expect from the Exynos 1480 and spoiler alert: It's a very solid mid-range chip that brings a lot of improvements over last year's Exynos 1380. Let's talk about what you can expect from this SoC.
The Exynos 1480 Ups The Graphical And Computing Power, Plus Comes With Some AI Smarts
Currently, the only smartphone in which you'll find the Exynos 1480 chipset is the Samsung Galaxy A55 which launched a couple of weeks ago. However, it is expected that future A-series devices will rely on this chip, and likely other Samsung series going forward.
Anyway, let's talk about the chip itself. First, the most important thing to know is that the chip is built on a 4nm process, similar to the Exynos 2200 in the Galaxy S22 Ultra. Plus, this new process is an improvement over the 5nm process for the Exynos 1380 in the Galaxy A54 last year—it basically means better efficiency—22% more, according to Samsung, so that means better battery life.
You get the same CPU cores as last year, with four Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.75 GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz. This is better than last year's chip just because the A78 cores run faster than last year's (which were clocked at 2.4 GHz), providing 18% better multi-core stats.
For gamers, one of the big wins of the new chip is that it leaves the Mali GPU from last year and moves over to a custom-built AMD GPU called the Xclipse 530. You can expect 53% better graphical performance compared to the chip in the Galaxy A54. That's impressive.
What Features Does The Exynos 1480 Support?
Now that we've talked about the major specs that you see on paper let's talk about the different features that the Exynos 1480 SoC will be able to support, starting with everyone's current favorite: AI. Samsung has worked on the NPU and AI engine in this processor and improved them significantly, offering 4x better AI performance. Hopefully, this means some Galaxy AI features (or Gemini Nano) will come to the 1480, but that might take quite some time.
There are some boosts to the cameras that phones like the A55 will be able to support. A single camera can go as high as 200MP, just like with the 1380, but now, there's finally on-chip support for 4K video at 60fps, which doubles the framerate compared with last year. You'll also get zero shutter lag when snapping for cameras under 64MP. Plus, AI imaging tech will make sure you get better images, even in low light.
The Samsung Exynos 1480 will also support Wi-Fi 6E and faster 5G speeds, which they didn't have last year. Bluetooth 5.3 also returns to the stage.
