Every year, Samsung rolls out a new mid-range Exynos chip developed in-house for the Galaxy A series. Even though the Exynos 2500 for premium devices might be in trouble in light of the bonkers Snapdragon 8 Elite reveal, things are going relatively well and according to plan for the mid-range chip lineup.
Samsung has just unveiled the Exynos 1580 SoC. It's not as impressive as the Snapdragon solution unveiled recently, but it was never meant to be. The Exynos 1580 is a mid-range chip, and Samsung didn't make a lot of fuss about it. Which was probably a wise move.
The upcoming Galaxy A56 is one of the company's mid-range devices expected to use this brand-new chip. Here's every specification Samsung has revealed about the new Exynos 1580 silicon this week.
Exynos 1580 specifications
The tagline Samsung uses for the Exynos 1580 chip is “Super smooth. Extremely efficient.” Raw hardware specs include:
- 4nm EUV FinFET process.
- Three-cluster CPU with 1 x Cortex-A720 core @2.9GHz, 3 x A720 cores @2.6GHz, 4 x A520 cores at 1.95GHz.
- Xclipse 540 GPU.
- AI engine with 6K MAC NPU.
- LPDDR5 memory support.
- Support for FHD+ display @144Hz.
- Support for 200MP camera and 4K 60fps video encoding/decoding.
- Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4, 5G.
A better NPU, GPU, and camera experience
In greater detail, Samsung says the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) can perform up to 14.7 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with a memory capacity increased to 2MB.
Better yet, mid-range phone gamers will love what Samsung had to say about the new Xclipse 540 GPU. Unlike the previous model, the Xclipse 540 adopts an additional WGP (Work Group Processor) for a total of two, plus an increased GL2 cache and twice the amount of FMA/texture unit processing.
Thanks to these upgrades, the new GPU employed by the Exynos 1580 boasts improvements of 37% over the predecessor, with a 20% increase achieved under the same power usage conditions.
Last but not least, the Exynos 1580 chip introduces a motion refinement feature and a large Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) that improve the Temporal Noise Reduction (TNR) performance. In practical terms, the Exynos 1580 should enable video recording with less noise in low-light settings and more vivid photos with clearer edges.
The Exynos 1580 chip is likely to debut with the Galaxy A56, which might be released early next year — assuming Samsung will follow the usual yearly launch schedule.